What's everyone think? SHould you b able to trade in CTP or EM or a certain artifact (Crimison obs. we woudl hope) for X amount of energy?

Na, I think the arti they give and the cheap GP option to refill your energy is more then enough in regards to energy regain. If anything I guess you can consider Rescued Prisoners like what you are talking about....for each one you turn in you gain a max of 6 energy and increase your energy cap by the same.

I would say no, you should at least earn your eng. Can easily be abused, the people with the abundance of eng are also the people with an abundance of the items you mentioned with respect to those lacking eng. Why wouldn't I just give the lower ranks some CTP/em ? 1k eng is worth more to them than it is to me, 1k eng for a rank 100 is probably worth more than 30k eng for a rank 1500.

good points

I wouldn't be opposed to a CTLab item which provided energy refills? Say, 10 Ship-Bots, 20 Shield Restorers and 20 ACFs? Gives an arti that restores 100 energy. Wouldn't be enough to abuse it (the high rankers with all the ship-bots would be able to make more but the energy would be less valuable to them). For example, I could only make 7.3K energy worth using my current ship bots. Something I wouldn't balk at, but that's 1/4 of my energy bar after months since I last scrapped them.

I wouldn't be opposed to trading in energy for EM or CTP