I'm hoping that this is just the first iteration and the next (or one after that at most) would add finer granularity. e.g. iteration #1 adds Constellation granularity and iteration #2 adds Solar System granularity.

The cube maps ( that's the technical term for the nebula textures ) are actually hand crafted, starting with 3d generated clouds, then color-corrected and touched up by artists to remove rendering artifacts and add extra "oomhp" to the renders. Each cube map sees a considerable amount of work. So if we would have wanted more, they would have looked less cool or taken longer to produce, meaning that the artists would be tied up painting nebulas and not fixing lag.... It's always a balancing act. That said, the system we developed alongside rendering the nebulas does allow us to customize each solarsystem, and we will be making use of that in the future, for lore and such.

Yeah, solar intensity reducing as distance to star increases.

Make the out-system really dark and lonely. Then add more glow to all those windows (viewports, energy channels, whatever they are) on the ships.

At 40 AU my Megathron oughta look like something out of the deep sea, glowy highlights picking out a dark mass.

Something that I noticed a long time ago: all stargates and stations have the same orientation - specifically they point "south". Will stargates be realigned (along the X-Y plane at least) to point towards their destination's celestial phenomena? Otherwise it will feel very odd knowing you are traveling north towards Caldari space but always being shot towards Amarr.
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Contrary to popular belief many of us do actually play the game. My bad at referring to an old mechanic but the point was that stargates have a collision model that would be different if they are rotated and that might affect bookmarks, which is always a concern when we do world changes.