I'd make caps a bit more vulnerable to snubs, maybe by giving vhf weapons a range and/or dps boost, or an additional missile/torp slot besides the CD.
Also do something about large caps getting stuck in jump holes, lanes, and gates, by making the dock radius of those larger, if possible.
And maybe reduce the spinning from npcs by removing their collision hitboxes (someone said they are different from shot hhitboxes), if necessary be introducing a few new non-collision ship models for NPCs only, at least in the places where they are the most annoying. Also remove NPC spawns in many (not all) places, where all they do is annoy without serving an actual purpose.
Finally, make the dense asteroid fields less dense by removing the smaller asteroids in them (or the collision checks for those). The vanilla asteroids were not made with player caps in mind, so adapt them.