I think something like this could also help augment bounties and replace killrights. If you could create a contract with a bounty hunter to do some damage to a target, either directly in terms of ship destruction, or otherwise affect their metrics, you could negotiate a direct bounty for the service, and possibly the contract could optionally include transfer of a killright. A content generator.
The downside is that is quite complicated and opens room for scams, although I guess anything is better than the verbal contacts that make up most mercenary work. It also might be hard to base it on metrics without leaking metrics. Some, like corp member number are clearly public, but others are non-obvious to an outsider.
But in top level I agree - more sandbox tools are a good thing. Creating mini-games to shape sandbox interactions has rarely worked well, and is probably a waste of developer time. What is better is to add desirable things, and let the universe figure them out, tweaking as necessary when something is solved to the point there is no other solution or viable gameplay around it.
The apparent purposeless-ness of wars reflects the purposeless-ness of highsec - there just aren’t that many things to fight over. The solution is not to make the wars themselves the thing to fight over - that is a silly mini-game no one is going to use - but rather objectives like resources and space and limited, desirable things to use the mechanic. I’m not against including structures into wars somehow to make everyone more vulnerable to each other, but how fun or Eve-like is it to fight over a useless structure?
I like your idea to provide a framework to facilitate trading of mercenary services is what I think the Mercenary Marketplace CCP promised during the last wardec revamp should have been, but it was delivered in only the barest of form. While I think it will be complicated to implement in a usable way, it could go a long way to provide meaning to wars and increse accessibility to competent allies for many of the smaller and isolated groups in highsec.
So +1.