I have found that game's economy is so broke, it is possible to make millions out of nothing. It gave me an idea, that it is possbile to play the game without touching the drill or multitool lol Good idea for youtube series
The economy is range limited, "static" and random. All items have a min-max price per trader, so long as the ranges are narrow enough, the availa volumes low enough, it's not terribly profitable to game the system. The Reforged scenario does a huge rebalance on the items values to cut this back. However it's not driven by an "engine", and relies on each day that stock levels are randomized. So yes, the levels and values are not realistic in the vanilla game, but even without an engine, it's possible to get it realistic enough just because it is random for any given day.
It is possible to remove all gold/credit sources from the game by editing all the scenario's files. Then you can set up traders to be the only way to get credits. You could also learn the Empyrion APIs and code some sort of add-on/mod to make better use of credits/gold. There are add-ons like this out there already.
Modders in other games are able to make a decent living making mods. If that were at all possible in Empyrion then Empyrion would have a larger fanbase.