Faction choices for more end game content

I was playing SE1 and musing on my prowess of excavating minerals. I am nothing if not efficient. The hard thing is, I can take about half of an ore spot in any given location and have more than enough materials to build whatever I want until late late in the game where I may have too do a run here or there. My mining infrastructure collects dust while I fart around doing other fun engineer-y things.

I do enjoy developing new ways to gather materials. With the advent of AI blocks, and the Action Relay (Love those 2 additions so much!), I can set up some crazy fun infrastructure. The problem is, by the time I get done with all the ferry drones that are going out to remote dig sites and gathering ores, I have 1000x more ore than I'll ever need or need to deal with. It makes the Mining bit of things rather superfluous late game which kills some of the game (for me/some).

What if this:

You had to pick from 3 or 4 different factions as an Engineer. Every faction has all the basic blocks and can make all the basic components except for a Faction Specific Frame (think the Factorum frame). No faction can make everything.

Faction 1: An advanced faction that has access to certain weapons blocks that the other factions do not have that are especially powerful.

Faction 2: Done lots of work near stars so has access to advanced armor plating.

Faction 3: Advanced Thrusters, warp drives or Something else that's important. A thought that I had was Electronic Warfare? Where you hit them with an ion pulse or something and knock out engines or turrets

Faction 4: Advanced Mining and Refining materials (may feel kind of lame, but keep reading about the miner magnate below).

The idea is that you as your faction will need to mine ore or salvage junk to sell for credits to buy the frames to make the blocks that you don't have access to simply build. Or you can choose to go straight up Pirate raid a faction to steal these blocks (possibly similar to the Factorum). The more I think about this, the Factorum idea would be the easiest way. Each faction has a specific set of tech they get to build*** via "frames" (as an example). The faction can make those frames. Other factions have to trade for it.

Now later game mining and collection has a true benefit as it can be sold for credits or traded for frames. Not only that but you can have NPC mining guilds who try and move in on your mining operation and will land near you and start extracting your minerals if you don't fend them off. As things progress they hire mercenary ships to protect the mining operation from you and you have to be ready for them.

You can have the advanced Weapon people be sort of marauding jerks who just keep building bases around in an attempt to lay claim to your systems. Then maybe they try and pull the "benevolent overlord" and tax you in Ore or credits or whatever or else suffer hits to your standing with the NPC of that faction.

This sort of late game things makes mining not a relic of early game, but gives MASSIVE levels of playability as well as a reason for being a mining magnate. Hey you can mine so much that you could pay NPC ships to guard you! Move in on other territories.

The factional choices make it so trade and commerce MUST be a thing thus the need to produce and do it efficiently. Maybe you Mine Platinum on the rings of [Planet] and 4000km away an NPC commerce guild is paying top dollar for it. Find a way to get the Platinum there ASAP engineer. Then you have to go over to another quadrant and exchange all the credits for some alt faction frames so you can outfit your ship.

***Also... Keen gets to add new unique blocks for the new factions with every release. New fun and crazy things like the advanced weapons folks get a (example) plasma cannon , the armors get reactive plating, the miners faction gets advanced mining drills or refineries. And so on. New releases mean new and exciting blocks that aren't Overpowered but add interesting new gameplay for the factions and a reason to spur your trade to acquire what you can't build to enhance your own builds.