I'm using minmatar as inspiration. I instantly thought of them when i started the pirate station. Also, your station is gorgeous.
I figure the devs set a size limit hoping that most players could manage it.
Can you even salvage a trade guild station? I was under the impression that you couldn't even damage it. Not only that but pirate stations are much more rare than trade guild stations. Perhaps there can be traps set that detonate the place. Nothing to salvage then.
I'm not saying ONLY trade stations... Most likely, many people will build big, because they think bigger is better.
Neutral stations are pretty plentiful too, and I have seen some pretty big neutral stations in this thread.
I don't exactly like big, performance-hungry things. Only very rarely I build such behemoths, but only for the sheer amount of detail I can put in.
Maybe not quite money bombs, since eventually it becomes annoying to fly around selling all of that hull, but they could certainly lower the value of certain materials dramatically. Perhaps stations need a system like planets are supposed to eventually get, where a person or faction has to keep an station for a certain amount of time before they can edit it.
...And the ability to vary station spawn frequency would be great, too.
... You don't have to sell the hull.
Many people will just keep it, and use the excessive amounts of filler-up materials in such stations (shields, power) to build stupidly massive doomcubes.
Humans are naturally people who suck all useful resources out of something, and then move on to the next. Just as bad as a group of locusts. And I expect most of the not-very-sensible starmade players to act the exact same way.
... But yes, to prevent that, such a system would be nice.