How about everyone thinks back about their first time on the server and how they experienced it. I was pretty impressed by Pennsylvania, as it was showing the progress of this mod pretty nicely. You have vanilla right next to you, while you are able to explore a system with so many planets, with planetary rings and moons, plenty of asteroid fields and a nebula that comes in very handy. The helium thing is pretty much the best thing for starters, and I do remember the many hours I used to haul stuff to Erie to earn my first Mammoth, Serenity and Mastodon. It's a really beautiful system with a good amount of detail. The only very dumb thing about it right now is the Kansas jump hole right there. Every newbie is like "Oh yes, I found that absolutely well hidden alien gate in that nebula without sensors in less than ten minutes" because of the online-navmap. Like, they don't even need to discover it. I'd definitely remove the Kansas-Penny conncection and place Puerto Rico back and add Humboldt back to where they belong. Those systems were perfect to move around Liberty. The Copper mining area can stay there or be moved to Pennsylvania to some outer area, as there are so many unused asteroid fields.
TL;DR: Penny works fine. Maybe add a few of the new station part models to Hamilton Station to impress newbies with some rare things. Works pretty well with Niigata in Sigma-59, which is pretty much the most badass station of the entire mod.