Honestly, you nailed it. Mod desperately needs meaningful stuff to do in-game. Relying on OFs alone to push content and "forumlancing" has not been enough to keep players in the actual game. Just look at the ratio, there's barely 10% of the people online on the forum in the actual game.
At this point there's more factions than players... And most factions exist to make a couple forum posts, fly around for a few weekends then quit because they get bored and that's it.
I get it that people enjoy to RP. But quality RP takes time and effort from every player involved. And people honestly have lives that don't revolve around Discovery.
IMHO what needs to be done is funnel the remaining players into fewer factions. Make each faction / type of faction unique with its gameplay options and make each faction have an achievable, defined gameplay-related goal.