I don't know, something like :
I didn't specially think about it (there is no point, I am not working at HG) but this is some idea. And the first two can give reasons to why going outside of our ship.
- abandonned ships / freighters
- getting rid of static asteroids everywhere and make them move and more interesting to mining
- ships convoy (from space to planet, space to space station or vise versa) that you can attacked or helped against attacked.
- Freighters against freighters combat (but they need to move for that, even slowly)
Yup this, I know they put asteroids *everywhere* because they're essentially gas for your ship, but there's gotta be some other way to resolve this than just having them spawn everywhere
I like how Elite tried to make mining more interesting, doing something similar would be lovely, but I doubt it'll be this update