here's a long post, but i've recenty grinded to get two battleships and cau's solely from smuggling, so i believe i've got a pretty good picture of how it is at the moment (I've bumped into you guys and flown with you too). its not so profitable, fairly boring, but it's darn easy. You can pop on a film and let the transport make money by itself, only having to visit the controls for a few seconds every system to pop above/below plane and docking with the JH's. By the time the film is done, you'll have made a hundred million and have avoided all interactions (for good and for bad). Extremely effortless profits compared to the F2/F3 nightmare of tradelane trading, it just takes a bit longer to get rich (or a lot longer compared to precious ores).
on the other hand I have run into other smugglers using my exact trade route (yes, I've run into them on my flight path above plane) and teamed up for a more delightful journey and fun RP. as escorts I imagine you will hardly ever meet us, unless you are constantly on the route yourselves or if you happen to be in front of malta when we arrive. perhaps you could sign a long-term contract regarding keeping the cardamine-corridor open (tau's through coronado into Liberty), be it by pews, by collecting intel and so on - however that might foster more activity in those systems, and us that "smuggle for a living" aren't exactly looking for that. your light fighters give large transports a speed boost when on "follow mode", I've benefitted from that by smuggling alongside a bactrian but I haven't paid attention to how much the speed boost actually pays off on the bottom line. it might be a selling point for you though if you meet profit-maximizing power-smugglers.
a long term solution would be as mentioned to buff the profit on smuggling, while increasing the risk through higher commodity cost. it would limit the easy mode smuggling described above or at least make it a lot more risky - you might get killed or fly into something if you dont pay attention, and you'd actually lose something from it. buffing profit will also make things more interesting: As it is now you will have to be in a large-ish transport for cardamine trade to really have a decent profit, which means you'll need a faction ID (rogue or outcast for instance) which in turn severely hampers your options - there's more or less only 1 route for Outcast ID'd transport, if you don't count more advanced routes into gallia involving brigands/junkers. One route makes trading extra repetitive, and a Freelancer "I-go-where-I-please" ship don't bring in decent enough profits.
