surely some of the solution is to reduce the amount of exiles so more mediocre players can stay in a good supportive gal, probably by giving gals a limited number as I think has been suggested recently by wishmaster: which will in turn push them as much as they can to getting an alliance who will support them in the long term.
I tangentially tried to think of some solutions in this post:
http://pirate.planetarion.com/showpo...2&postcount=12
Heartless also makes a good point; assuming you would have travel times affected by distance increasing all the way around the sphere gradually, rather than simply removing the whole concept of lower travel times for anything but alliances, which would imo be a disaster for new players.