i dont know on what for an server you are playing but i play with an own faction ( 9 people) on an server with the difficulty "hard" since weeks while we aren´t in the 0sec´s of galaxy yet. the "best" faction actually has problems to get the money for the mass of crew taxes.
with 1Billion Credits, you can only pay the membership of your own battlecruiser and some pvp supported structures. (you need shields, crews, turrets and support ships for each station. to make an huge business to get the money for your crews, you need very large facilities. tradingroutes are fully custom because NPC routes are in the "end-level" not useful)
i understand if your faction only plays in PVE (so i think) but on PVE and PVP servers, it is an other gameplay and perfect balanced. hint: check your server options if you are the admin for harder difficulty settings.
the only thing what will be a rly nice thing is, to get more options as server admin to make more custom changes. actually it is only possible with mods.