My suggestion is as follows, and would more than likely ease some of the tensions caused by players (whether unintentional or not).
SET LEASE TIMES FOR LONG LEASE SHIPS
What I mean by the previous line, is the larger ships, meant for probably 6+, or more, crews. As it stands currently, most of, if not all of, the large ships, or in this case, long lease ships are consistently not up for purchase because of the continued abuse of the system as is. Similar to Doortouchers (you know who you are), Shiptouchers (I think it fits well enough here) should be removed as a menace to the server. I hear consistently from people outside of the main Arelith discord, about how they wish they could set up scenes, or even just go on large adventures within their small circle, but cannot because the long lease ships are continously unusable unless given permission by whoever holds the lease at the time.
There should be a set time of 6 months maximum for holding onto a lease, and once that time is up, you fork over the lease and it allows the ship to go up for auction. In order to combat people obviously using new characters to just purchase the lease again, the lease is tied to your account, so once the lease is up, then for a following six months, you cannot purchase another lease. This is all in order, in my opinion, to combat the stagnant abuse of the current systems that allows for no one else to make use of server resources. People should not be able to hoard ships that the server as a whole can use, when most of the time, they probably are not even going to use it. I have heard rumors of people getting their hands on ships, and then logging off, only to log back in on the day of the lease expiring, then re-obtaining said lease, and disappearing again, not even so much as playing the game while they have it.
Yes I understand people do use them for rp, however if you aren't apart of that clique? Well then your options are limited until you either A: join that clique, or B: someone mysteriously disappears/gets banned/closes their account/etc etc.
edit: Minor edit on my part I forgot to put in, Once you purchase the lease for 6 months, you have it, and then for the following six months after that, you cannot purchase a lease for another large scale/long lease ship, totaling in a year's worth of IRL time from being able to purchase long lease/large scale ships