Considering that Dom has a not lockable npc station anyone can dock in, the fact that in the last week we've hit several saps, and bombed 50+ noralgis plants, and killed heavies on the island, I would say that you're wrong about it being "a turtle island without turrets."
Now, when I came back late last year, and jumped onto bergers for the first time, THAT is what I would call a "turtle Island", being that there were mudwalls lined with really scary turrets that locked at 1800m. For someone to get onto bergers and past that wall took serious effort with terraformers.
Any island I can jump into, freely walk off the gate and not get shot by turrets... well, that's just an island ripe for roaming.
The whole reason for taking epri off of gamma was that you could mine it from docking range of a base, on an island that took tons of prep work just to get on it. Fix those two problems and there's really no reason why epri shouldn't be on gamma, unless you're planning on adding another high end ore found only on gamma, or make colixium be required for all mk2 production or something along those lines. As it is, there's really not much point in putting billions of nic worth of base mods on an island you can't rat on or mine epri. Except for maybe one alliance so they can protect their noralgis farms a little better