the drop rates and bots have made pve suck... i cant imagine building stuff with the current drop rates

The drop rates weren't changed. Just the capship turrets have a reduced rate, plus there are absolute per-sector caps.

People did PvE before they had capships.

[Edit] note you can no longer see certain items in bot cargo before you kill them, but that has zero impact on drop rate. It's just assessed on-death instead of when the bot is spawned.

Also, from my graphs, some people are still farming SSS pretty successfully, and avoiding the sector caps. Just not to the insane degree provided by the auto turret issue.

No sector limits have been hit, outside of one instance with SSS, in the last couple of days.