1. I'd like to see pirates get more diverse in general. Be it with stolen ships from none TEC factions or technologies from various factions.
2. Don't particularly like this personally
3. I'd prefer something like a certain planet has a disease that lowers allegiance by a given % (say 10%), causes population to decrease at some rate and has a small percent chance to be transmitted to other planets by trade ships. After some amount of time this wears off as the population builds immunity and life goes on as before, any transmission of the disease would be like a planet initially being hit by it and would have to wait until their strain wore off. This could even be more likely on greenhouse, terran or oceanic planets than ice, barren, volcanic, etc.
4. I dislike this more than I dislike #2