Cade,

I pulled the most relevant statistics that I could find, unfortunately, they didn't cover large periods of time. If you have better statistics, by all means, bring them into the conversation. I'd like to see them.

Droppers generally don't avoid counterdrops because the droppers plan well; they avoid them because the amount of effort required to defend against drops is vastly greater than what is required to drop. Convincing people to spend hours upon hours of time on a POS or in a station waiting for something that may or may not happen is a very tough sell, and brings into question the viability of ratting or mining in null at all rather than just making money in highsec with an alt, or jumpcloning to high when you need some isk. Considering the sheer volume of unoccupied systems in null compared to the bustling activity of highsec, it appears that many people have come to this conclusion.

It's pretty bold of you to say that your opinion represents the playerbase. There are many opinions on this issue. Some like it, some hate it, and some just want to run numbers in Jita or explore things in wormholes and couldn't care less.

The PANIC module helps one type of activity, and makes response fleets a bit more viable for that activity, but in my opinion, it addresses the symptom of the issue, not the issue itself.

When it comes to covert ops viability, I said from the beginning that changes would need to be made to intel. Later in the thread, I even suggested changes, though I do have a few misgivings with my own idea, and it probably would need some tweaks.

Captals would still be extremely viable if these changes were made. You don't need a battleship to bring them in, you need 1500 PG (which you can get on a T1 cruiser. In fact, as I look at the numbers, I may have made the requirement too small) and 20 seconds. However, you do mention sacrificial battleships, which is not the intent of this idea at all. Perhaps the overall time of the cyno could be reduced, it would make the cyno ship more survivable after the jump is complete.

For large fleet fights, cynos are not balanced with other ways of positioning forces. Mobile cyno inhibitors are not survivable and cover a pitifully small section of space, especially considering the range of carriers and the size of citadels. System cyno jammers are viable, and add a lot of interesting gameplay as people try to take them down in order to bring a capital fleet in. This would add another layer onto that so there's still some counterplay and strategy after the system cyno jammer goes down.

When it comes to jump freighters, they already get special abilities when it comes to jump fatigue. If it's an issue, you could put it onto this too so they could go through a small or medium cyno rather than just a large or capital one.