Official Factions exist to drive the role and roleplay of their NPC Faction. That's why they exist as 'Official'.
Most Official Factions are directly related to their NPC Faction (A counter example would be the LE which are the Official Faction of the Gallic Brigands). That means that if their Factions Roleplay/Lore is entirely/partially based on their NPC Factions'.
This means that the [LN] behave as the Liberty Navy NPC Faction, which is a PVP faction, as most Factions in this game are. You can't change that.
This isn't necessarily bad, as I saw players roleplaying their Official Faction characters on the Forum.
Guess why? Because when David Hale logs on, you know it's either a) somewhere in Liberty PVP is about to go down, or b) PVP happening in Liberty right now. When people see a [LN]/RM/GRN ship/ships logging on, they know PVP furballs are incoming. Especially at peak hours. You won't see a [HF] showing up into that furball to talk about how he got wasted last night.
The only exception that comes into my mind is the TAZ, who are a Roleplay based faction because they belong to the Zoners.
Now you said roleplay used to be larger quantity/better before. Roleplay is a commodity that perishes. Even in space, there aren't that many out of the ordinary situations that you can create to generate roleplay for long. They run out. The Navy boy who lost his mother and her frying pan to a hungry Rogue raid. The 9000'nd Colonial Civilian who watched his dog die to Outcast gunfire and now wants revenge in black and red ships. We've seen it all before, again and again. And it's boring, it's not interesting anymore. The Discovery Lore doesn't generate enough situations to allow for lengthy roleplay. Not everyone will create Ronins to play an exiled Kusarian.
Which leads to Indies. Making a random character that isn't the typical marine/soldier/grunt who isn't bound to a factions' roleplay allows freedom in roleplaying. I've seen indies roleplaying from Space Soda Merchants to Space Nuns, to Space Medics, to the ordinary dude who just bought a Starflier and doesn't know how to fly it and lost his manual.
But the bottom line is that Roleplay runs out. And nobody is to be blamed for that.
