It's too late for extreme changes. Any bigger change would piss off too many people. People feel entitled to the influence they have right now, regarding any aspect of game and community.
Before anything else can be done, the game needs more attention and more new people. Emphasis on new. New people, free from grudges against the majority of not-my-faction. People who don't just sit on the forum 24/7 and watch the playerlist until something "worthy to log for" is online. Right now, people don't log until something happens. But nobody is willing to create something worth logging for. I am not talking about events by players or admins, or game masters since the devs couped the only controlling instance. People with motivation, with awe for what Discovery gives.
What can be done about that? There are some things everyone can do. We can't expect egocentric a-holes to suddenly become nice people, but even an egocentric a-hole can spread the word on imgur, facebook, twitter, instagram, you name it. People like to browse through stuff like imgur, and it will definitely catch more attention than that shabby moddb page or those pictures we have on the main page of the server. People don't look at that. People look at the forum and browse through current pages. People love to look at things like this and this and this.
Without new people, the view on the current staff, specifically the devs, won't change, because in this community, people rarely change their opinions, and rarely people deserve a second opinion. New people don't give a damn about what this person did or what reputation that faction has. New people just want to enjoy the game and explore and play with possible new friends.
However, this also means people need to be helpful and nice to newcomers instead of flying cruisers and destroyers in Penny to hunt miners and other very obvious newcomers. This also means to be more respectful to those people who do things for the first few times. If you don't want to bring up the time to teach and tutor them, then at least don't be an a-hole to them. You know enough other people to waste your aggressions on.
This also means the devs should stop removing content left and right for the sake of what they consider streamlining or "system design wisdom". And maybe we could put an end to these backdoor developments. I guess more than half of the active players are currently sitting in at least one dev chat on Discord and argue militantly about things that could be argued over openly on the forum and even put into the game. I see 1iCs constantly crying about a lack of organic roleplay and a lack of solid basis for results that suddenly happen. Why is all the effort happening where people don't see it? Why do you put so much effort into things hidden on various intransparent rooms while the forum dies more and more? The forum is literally the most important place. Everyone checks it out. Everyone sees that during certain times only a handful of people are online, ingame and on the forum.
