For comparison: it takes Ashes of Creation 100 developers and a forked version of Unreal Engine 4 --which prevents them from upgrading to Unreal 5 – in order to produce what looks to be a run-of-the-mill themepark RPG-centric MMO. Folks in this thread are asking CCP to magically conjure those level of resources and more.
We can then also go the opposite approach: imagine asking Ashes of Creation developers to “simply add a Eve-like fantastical seafaring-ship-in-3D-navigating-the-floating-islands-of-the-heavens MMO gameplay” to their game since all the characters there are now captains of their own heavenly-seafaring ships.
There is but it is not free. Parts of data in the existing EvE engine that were not distributed between different systems (perhaps it was designed for a single category of distributed system, but not two distinct ones) become categorically differently-distributed, which suddenly invokes the CAP theorem. Dealing with that in a system that wasn’t initially designed for that, is not trivial. That alone is far more than just “shipping a few environment data to move a char around”.
I understand you’re also a programmer which is why you should also understand the danger of the “why is this hard everyone could just do this on their own” – the “infamous DropBox comment” kind of comment.