What are their thoughts about adding alternative rewards, such as unique items, reputation, or anything else?
TL;DRThey definitely want alternative rewards like unique items, uniforms and ships, but these depend on unfinished features such as persistent habs and shared access for party members.
They definitely want to do it, it's just that these things rely on other features that don't exist yet or are still being worked on. Unique items, for example, would need somewhere for them to be stored, like properly persistant Habs that Players can decorate. Reputation on the other hand, will be directly tied to completing missions for certain in-game organisations as they touched on earlier (so it seems rep' wouldn't be a reward in-and-of itself, more just something that goes up and down depending on the Player's actions). They've been wanting to do missions that give Players uniforms, and that allow Players to have ships such as is prototyped with the Pachecho mission. What they need is to be able to tie these things into the actual system that Players use right now so that party members can open doors and stuff, because at the moment with the Pacheco mission, only the person who has the mission can fly the ship.