Dear Novaquark,
haven't read through all the DevBlogs yet, but the idea your transporting sounds very enticing. You yourself often take EVE Online as a comparison and want to expand on the sandbox made available there. Instead of CCP providing "Citadels" to the players, in a sandbox it should be other players constructing and selling "Citadels" and many other things a creative community will come up with.
It will be interesting to see, how this added freedom and sandbox will play out.
Getting to the point of this post, again you often refer to EVE Online and the community, the market, economy, PvP to be had there.
One aspect that has helped EVE a lot is the introduction of an API, that allow to read/export game data and create applications out of game that help with the individual gameplay. The variety of such 3rd party applications has grown to a huge amount and many players use such applications/sites on a regular basis.
However since this API wasn't on the plan during the creation of the game, there are certain restrictions to the data available and the possibilities.
Thus the question, if a API/automated data export functionality is planned from the get-go, thus being available in a rudimentary form in the alpha or beta already?
And of course if you are interested in and allowing 3rd party applications to expand on the sandbox, you are creating?
Thanks and very interested in seeing how DU will evolve,
Successor