They were good thoughts, and will be useful for sorting out other game(s) in the same setting. :)
Other potential "why this hasn't been salvaged" options:
- Anyone can restore an abandoned station; tearing it apart for salvage runs into complex legal issues.
- (Maybe anyone can't just restore it - but the hippies have high-status connections and that part's been dealt with.)
- Travel to & from here is really expensive or troublesome; something-something warp-gate, magnetized-asteroid-field, skirt-the-edge-of-hostile-alien-territory, etc. Making the trip once or twice isn't a problem, but regular back-and-forth is near impossible.
- The coordinates for the station are wrong in most of the record-books; people have tried to find it for salvage and failed. (The hippies insist they got the correct coordinates "in a vision.")
- Whatever drove away the original commerce in the area - disease, bad cosmic rays, solar flares, weird alien breeding cycles, etc. - had to die down before salvage could be attempted. It's all long gone, but so is the interest in the area; it's no longer news anyone is paying attention to.
Hope you have fun with it!