Apologies for not reading the whole thing, am too lazy to do so in this case. I'll just address the main problem for me about escorts which you kinda mentioned at the start. Firstly I'd love to have escorts with me while trading, I for one don't mind at all cutting into my profit a bit in order to have em.
The question for me personally, is not what you said at the start, how do we make it worthwhile for traders, who don't wanna cut into their profit. But how do we make it worthwhile for the escorts! As I said I'll happily pay for escorts and would love for some faction escorts on convoys (which I do often have in LR- when smuggling is more about the RP and less profit, but less so for Platinum| where it is more about the money). However there is little incentive to be an escort on such convoys, when instead you could be taking along another transport and making however million credits it is per run.
As for how to solve that issue, beats me. But I'll pay for freelancer and my own factions escorts any day, just not as high a chance that'd I'd want to do the escorting myself...