Nemo I like some of your ideas, I think something like a Red vs. Blue might be interesting to a fair amount of people myself included.

I always thought there was far too much of a stigma in PPO with most players about losing their bots.  If the fight was not completely onesided then it was not worth fighting seemed to be the mantra for most of the corps and fc's which really sucked the wind right out of the game for me some nights.  When I took a bot out for a roam I wrote it off in my mind right away, my only goal was to have some fun and blow some stuff up before it met it's eventual demise.

I haven't been ingame recently but what I personally always thought would be more fun was more t1 squads mixed with t4 and making sure your corp had 10+ t1 replacements fitted and ready to go so losing their bot was not a painful thing.

Keep the expensive pricy mechs mainly for pve, or for rich person pvp.  The key is promoting more action, and being less hung up on the epeen of "I blew up your bot therefore you are the worst player to have ever played this game, even though you engaged me in a suboptimal situation".