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We basically had the idea in discord to have small pockets of the map be inaccessible until you defeat a "fortress sector." where the enemies are more numerous and maybe even contain a randomly generated boss or something. Once the sector is cleared, the pocket will become accessible via jumps. inside this small pocket might be an enemy HQ, better drops, a high concentration of claimable asteroids or secret stashes, etc. Things that the player would like. Accessing a fortress sector would be done by a special gate that tells the player it leads to the fortress sector. You cant directly jump into it until its cleared. Afterward the player clears it, the rift/wall around the small pocket would disappear allowing hyperspace jumps in and out of it. Some kind of map marker or color would remain denoting which sectors are a part of the hidden pocket - maybe even just automatically get tagged as "secret space" with map tags.

Currently, the game sprays you with a firehose of point defense chainguns and point defense lasers. You don't need nearly as many as it gives you. It also gives you a TON of anti-fighter turrets, which you need even less than PDCs / PDLs. I looked through the script for weapon probabilities, and p for point defense chainguns / lasers is 1. It is 2 for anti-fighter turrets. I'd suggest reducing it to 0.25 for each. I think you could even go as low as 0.12 for anti-fighter turrets. Also, would it be possible to make it so that legendary PDCs / PDLs / Anti-Fighter turrets don't drop from enemies? There's nothing quite as annoying as getting excited about a legendary weapon dropping, only for it to be an Anti-Fighter turret. I made a mod that does all of this, but Tengu commented that it would be nice to see this in the base game, so I figured I'd toss it on here.

a cluster of 2 to 16 systems with jump gates, in a rift with one one access point, might provide this system without having to resort to manually designing such scenarios completely.