As @Joe-Bekur said, there's no reward. What you said is almost random words.
From the beginning and throughout the videos, the PURPOSE of the mechanic is combat between factions. Not 2v1, 3v1 or whatever. Not battle royale. However, some players manage to use game mechanics to distort the purpose, as is the case I mentioned earlier with 2v1. It wasn't a random ship, it was clearly an alliance exploiting a, as you said, "legit" mechanic.
And NO, I'm not crying cheats because they are decent players, I know how to recognize one good player after 2k hours, the same as "suspecting" a cheater. They (cheaters) have almost the same behaviour. However, this is another problem and NOT the focus of this topic.
Applying for a pvp combat is supposed to be funny. However, we deal with humans who tend to abuse flawed mechanics (you know the word "EXPLOIT") in order to get "victories". This type of abuse doesn't amuse most players and, worse, encourages them to leave the game. And that's another problem, as we all know that we don't have a HUGE community.
After more than 2k hours, I can tell you that the learning curve of this game is too slow. Bringing a lot of frustration, especially for beginners, is extremely disastrous for the community. We play for FUN. We care about this game and community. We wanna have fun! So think... how do we have fun? Exploiting mechanics as you said?
Purpose!