Pirate Bases settings appear to have no effect

Pirates have been neutered for a while now. There was a change to their behavior that stopped them from going across the galaxy to attack the player. This was causing some lag and slow turn times so they ended that little bit of code. I would (LOVE) to see the code changed so they seek out all ai races and are a threat once again. 

But then, I have advocated for a 'Pirate DLC' for a couple years now that lets us interact with them and hire them out as raiders on other ai. I'd like to see them as nefarious minor that has more abilities  then a minor but not the expansionist ability of majors. I'd like to see them as factionalized aggressors with different names like Bob's Berzerkers, Kell Hounds, Wolfs Dragoons...(yea I am a backer...) and other names but again that would be a DLC....

One of the latter patches has made it so that pirate bases have a min distance they can spawn in relation to a races home planet as apparently the AI, and even the player I guess, was having trouble early on dealing with them as they would just keep destroying their shipyard or colony ships they had just built. I guess this has had the side effect of pirates not spawning anywhere important that might effect the game.

I wonder if instead say after say 25 turns there should be a chance of pirate bases spawning in the FOW, or at least have them have a chance to re spawn, up until the number of pirate bases the game started with. So if a game started with 10 pirate bases and 3 are destroyed, 3 more upto a max of 10 can re spawn in the fow. Kinda like how civ does with barbarians but with a cap so that on larger maps we arnt flooded with to many pirates slowing down the game. We can still have a min distance of some sort but it might help change up the game play. However if they did implement anything like this there NEEDS to be code added that will stop a ship before completing its moves and alert the player as soon as a pirate ship comes into view, otherwise we are going to have the micromanage so many more things when flying around in previously explored areas.