The main thing to understand is Cryptic is a company looking to make money. Being the main driving force, all exchanges will benefit them more than us as players - P2P or F2P. Taking that into consideration, Cryptic needs to look at supply and demand factors. The need for dilithium has skyrocketed recently e.g. a special base project runs 200,000 dilithium.
As my fleet is less than 25 players this amount is way too high. It takes two days just to earn 1,500 myself and with the special projects switching so fast then only one is completed every few months. For fleets with more than 300+ players that number is feasible but keep in mind such a few number of fleets will reach that number.
So my basic analogy is they need to lower dilithium costs across the board or raise the amount of dilithium earned through missions and DOFF missions.