Instead of the mandatory prestige objective, which I think is awfull and is the main reason I don’t play hardcore, they could have done a “notoriety” system similar to Blood money’s. The higher your notoriety, the more cameras and enforcers there´ll be, along with extra assasins and lookouts for showdowns. That way players will have to be more cautious in hardcore, in contrast to the messier playthroughs that usually happen on standard mode. They could also add ways to reduce your notoriety by paying merces, like in Blood Money, and make them more expensive as the campaign goes on.
Freelancer in general needs more ways to spend your money besides buying weapons, they tried to fix this issue with the prestige system but I think that’s a lazy solution. They could add the ability to start undercover, stash an item/weapon or get some pre-mission intel by paying merces, maybe make this options a bit expensive to prevent players from using them in every mission and then make them even more expensive or straight up unavailable for hardcore mode.