It doesn't sound like Zoom is against a plex type system, simply that at this time the player base isn't large enough to justify having it.
*Small base = fragile market and economy
Exchanging money for time is exactly what money is for. As my friend said about buying WoW-gold "I don't have 10hrs a week to grind gold, I'd rather spend my time having fun."
When (crosses fingers) Perp gets bigger, there WILL be NIC farmers that will create an out-of-game NIC RTS site.
When that happens, is when AC doesn't have the luxury of not implementing a plex system.
From a producer's view point, the inflation scenrio is as follows:
Combat guys farm NIC and sell plex. Players selling Plex use it to buy bots and modules so they can PVP, have fun, without any grind.
Indy players, also wanting to play for free, need to make NIC so they can buy plexes too, in competition with the combat guys.
Since players now have lots of NIC from selling plex, indy raise prices.
With rising bot prices, casual PVP bot buyers raise the sell price of PLEX, so they can continue to buy bots and modules. Lots of NIC is being pumped into the market from combat farming, and that is flowing to Indy, so both are able to afford the new higher Plex prices. However, the indy player can't just 'farm more NIC", the only way for them to make more NIC is to sell more bots or sell them at a higher prices. Since the PVP players are already buying large voumes of bots, because the effort to get them is solely dependant on their wallet and not on time, there's no more volume increase, so prices again have to increase.
Eventually, the combat farmers max their per/hr gain, but the indy guys keep raising prices.
*Note that Indy is BOTH factory and Marketeer's.
And then, as Zoom has now predicted, the only way to afford a bot now, is to sell plex. You can't even build your own, since miners have raised prices accordingly too (so they too can play for free).
tl;dr - In a player run market, simply focusing on how much NIC/hr combat players can earn to buy plex to play free is ignoring the industrial side, which only generates NIC from the player base itself, which will lead to inflation.