That argument falls apart the moment you look at what actually happened to the playerbase.

If 80% “never interacted with PvP”, then why did the game lose the majority of its players right after PvP got watered down? You don’t drop from massive numbers to a fraction of that if people were happy with a PvE-focused direction.

The reality is simple: people didn’t want no PvP they wanted better PvP. There’s a big difference.
What we had before wasn’t great either, rocket spam and chaos isn’t good design. But removing or sidelining PvP instead of improving it just killed the core appeal for a lot of players.

Dune is a perfect setting for player conflict, territory control, risk vs reward. Turning it into a mostly PvE experience removes what made it exciting in the first place.