Kudos to the many changes and fixes. They are appreciated!
Just to be helpful though, here's a few things I noticed after a longish play session:
Difficulty slider -- when set to Advanced, loot drops are all batteries. No exceptions (for me at least). Switching back to Normal = immediate loot that is not batteries.
PvP Queuing -- going to a PvP match does not save my mission progress any longer. This is kinda big.
Melee strike in ground pvp still results in holds. Major patch feature that isn't working.

Besides that, things are looking up so far.
Comments
Sure there are some issues that need ironing out, there's bound to be. I tested out the difficulty slider and death penalty on Tribble, but it wasn't until it went live that I teamed up using the difficulty slider.
Me and a friend ran our B'tran dailys together on elite, and the space battles were genuinely challenging and much more fun, the death penalty added the level of jeapardy that i personally felt was lacking.
As the OP mentioned, loot drops seem to happen on the advanced setting rather than elite, I'm sure that will be adressed.
Lots of little improvements all over, very good job well done.
(I have not tried the pvp changes yet, but look forward to checking them out)