It's one of those things the developers probably would like to do, but since there's no way to gather metrics from the game to support these ideas it's hard to justify to the folks setting the budget that's it's worth the development time. I'd say the easy way to give it a test to see fanbase support of the idea is to just put in shaders for ships and sparrows and make them only rewarded by doing a specific task. For sparrows a simple concept: make three check points and a portal. If the player can get through all three and into the portal within a certain window of time it takes them to an area with a loot box that always drops a random sparrow shader along with some glimmer. Have the loot box reset every day so players could do it multiple times a week, and just watch the numbers. How many do it? How often do they do it? Do they still do it when there's no reward? Do others do it with them to race them? How often does this occur? What percentage of the fanbase does this? And so on, and so forth. Only once they have valuable data to support the development can they justify doing it. It's a Triple A game, and neither publishers nor studios make decisions lightly with 500 million dollar investments in a 10 year IP.