From a developer point of view I can not see why on earth this is being done and being done the way it is being done.

Here is the best way to implement your new AI if you are really hell bent on having a new one:

-Do not implement the new AI on ANY old content.
-Create entirely new missions, encounters, experiences, and rewards based around your new AI.

The benefits:
-As a player you retain the sandbox experience. Players continue to have a choice about their game experience and which kind of content they wish to participate in.

-As a Dev you don't have to examine and tweak every individual mission, complex, and site for problems and forum complaints.
-As a Dev you can start by creating an example mission where people can test the newly introduced set of missions under a controlled scenario with different ship setups, drones, and player compositions.
-As a Dev you don't have account for every single situation where your new AI changes have broken parts of the game that you did not think of, ignored, or missed.

-As a company you retain the player base that actually enjoys the way content is and has been for near a decade.
-As a company you bring in new players and retain old ones because you are actually releasing new content.

Any other way and your looking at losing customers and in the process creating a nightmare of work for yourself by having to retweak every single mission and each individual mission scenario.
In addition you risk breaking many parts of the game that obviously were not considered, such as PVP mission ganking, ninja salvaging, and much more. By creating an example mission, every player class and every play style from PVP to PVE to anything in between can run and gank this mission, bring in lower level friends, ninja salvage, test and plug grief tactics and identify and plug possible exploits.

If I decide to quit it won't be because I dislike the proposed new AI system, but because of the way it is being implemented. In its current form it breaks existing content that was previously not broken and takes away attention and Dev time from issues in the game that are clearly still broken such as the inventory system, bounty system, alliance and corporation system, medals system, black ops, and the list endless. The forums are ripe with issues from the player community that remain to be addressed and with these proposed changes and in the manner in which they are being proposed is just begging for even more player discontent based on mission bugs or its effect on their style of gameplay.

I hope you take these suggestions as a player who really does not want to quit and has stated the obvious not out of criticism but as a genuine way to retain your player base and better the game.