Topic: NPC commodity market
... not trade goods, actual commodities (and fragments, possibly even decoders and kernels).
Essentially my argument for this hinges on division of labour, or complete lack thereof. This is a critical balance issue, mostly revolving around critical mass driving actual supply and demand.
The trade profession (as an actual profession, with a low barrier of entry), in my opinion essential to the sandbox, can't exist as it stands. As such, combat players have no reason to sell their minute quantities of kernels, fragments, decoders, damaged loot (= commodities). The industrialist (prototyper, refiner, producer) needs to get every component at great transactional costs (too great, if the retention rate is something to go on). I feel that what it comes down to is that for every new player wanting to take any industrial role in this game, they need to adopt every conceivable (pve) role in this game.
This boils down to the very promise of this game being a blatant lie; there's no player-driven economy. No supply and demand, no division of labour, no specialization. It's just people selling a (truly random) assortments of modules, and people putting up buy orders that in no way reflect the true value of items (whatever that is, obviously).
To conclude this wall of text; expand the selection of NPC buy/sell orders to aforementioned commodities, with prices of factional items varying among the islands (driving trade). This wouldn't be the first sandbox economy kick started using this method...