guns are pretty useless in high sec. Since you can't start firing until they do without getting concorded, you can still see your hauler volleyed off the field before you can reduce their ganking squad enough to save it. And with sec tags, gankers don't really need to put time or effort in to keep themselves high enough to avoid being valid targets for a preemptive hit, they simply spend some of their victims isk on tags and instantly become "good" again.

Make kill rights so they only get used up once that killright has been used to kill the pirate with the equivalent value of the ship they killed to earn it (so if you kill a billion isk of ship, it can be repeatedly used until it's cost you a billion isk), and guns will be back in play.

It's not though, is it? It's not at all dark and gritty, it's just that people can run up to noobs and smash their heads in in a single hit. It's no more dark and gritty than a PvP WoW server.

EVE is moving to a place where there are no more consequences. Take the sec tags for example. Now you can run around ganking like crazy, wait 30 days for your kill rights to drop off, pay a bunch of isk to jump your sec status back up instantly and shazzam you are no longer a pirate.

And part of it is that too much focus has gone into making people vulnerable. Take corps for example. Awoxing being so easy to pull off and the lack of benefits of being in a player run corp means there's no real reason to move out of an NPC corp in high sec. It would be better to give people more opportunities to choose to put themselves at risk because it's worth doing. Making it too tough then just saying "tough luck" whenever someone tries and fails isn't really good encouragement to try again.

I would love EVE to be a dark and gritty hardcore game, but that's really not what it is.

What buffs?
If it's so easy, why is it so rare?

You mean the things that not even managed to maintain the status quo in the face of the massive nerfs? The ones that led to ganks becoming more and more rare over time? No, that was not a buff GÇö those were nerfs that would have been downright insulting unless the gankers were given something in the way of compensation.

So in other words: laughably rare.

Numerous CONCORD buffs. Numerous target buffs. Numerous price increases. Numerous increases in penalties. Huge increases in the manpower and time required. Vastly improved means of striking back. Vastly improved means of defence.

No. Just no. Even suggesting such a thing is pure ignorance.

If you're going to make that kind of claim, you need to back it up with some kind of actual evidence. You need to show that several dozens of haulers get ganked (not just killed GÇö ganked) in each and every of the bottleneck systems. You need to show dozens of mission runners getting blown up in each mission hub. You need to show clouds of CONCORD constantly surrounding every gate in and out of Jita (to say nothing of 4-4 itself). You need to demonstrate dozens of well-known ganking corps doing their business in said spots, rather than just a handful.

Hint: you will not be able to do any of this, because ganks have never been as rare as they are at the moment. You are either ignorant or lying. Take your pick.

So in other words, they're not just laughably rare but also laughably easy to avoid.