Alright, I created an account with this site JUST to throw in my two cents and make a few things obvious.
1: There are plenty of potential players who won't even touch the game BECAUSE they lost something they spent months saving on, and sorry but unless i'm a super hardcore fan of the game, i'm not going to spend 6 or 7 more months saving up JUST to get that ship back.
2) It is NOT "one person's fault" when your ship is destroyed, sometimes its the fault of the fleet who just happened to find you when you didn't want to fight at all, you were just exploring.
3) This games appeal could be a LOT higher if it had land based combat, imagine being able to land on various planets, all of them with their own unique set of dungeons and monsters, so you don't have to grind through the same crap every day.
4)I'm not sure if this is a fact or not, so please correct me if i'm mistaken. But the fact you're totally alone unless you join a Cooperation or Organization of some sort, is also a big turn off. If you have a ship large enough to have a fighter bay, why not have some NPC fighters? And the higher amount you pay for your pilots, the better their AI and the less likely you are to get shot down by an a random group because you just want to explore the universe and have fun.
I have never played the game personally, but based off observation and facts, these are the points I have come up with, if you disagree with them fine, if you disagree with me saying the game has less appeal because what's gone is gone, I give you the bird, games should NOT be super-realistic, that defeats the purpose of them being GAMES.
I have a friend who played this game himself, and he ended up quitting because he got sick of saving up large amounts of money just to get the ship he lost back. Insurance, according to him, is totally useless because it never covers the full cost of the ship.
Sorry, but higher difficulty =/= better in all cases.
This is why I play Anarchy Online, its not at the same level of complexity of Eve, but it is probably the most complex land based MMO available today...also the free play has a lot of appeal too.
I've said what I wanted to say, I don't much care what sort of responses any of you have but i'll probably check in the future to see what you say anyways. I don't expect anyone to actually ACKNOWLEDGE the validity of my statements, but that's fine...long as my opinion is in the swarm of biased praise i'm happy.