With Uprising 1.7 CCP made the first step of making the Dust-Eve-Link a bit stronger. But there is still one problem: The locations of the battles in Dust are pretty random. Scotty just decides where we fight and that's it. This makes it harder for Dusties to get Eve support and it also makes it harder for Eve players to give that support, because sometimes it happens that the capsuleers have to make 10+ Jumps to get to a battle location. By the time they arrive the battles are often already over.

The solution to this problem is of course to let either Dust players or Eve players decide where these battles take place. But I don't think the current system should be abolished. Instead I had the following idea to expand on FW:

Eve players should be able to buy Mercenary Contracts in the LP store of the FW Factions. These contracts would cost about 10.000 LP and 250.000 ISK each. Of course these numbers are just placeholders and would be up for discussion. Once bought the Eve player can activate this contract and then would be able to fill it out. The capsuleers would be able to do the following:

Who is the contract issued to? - Private Person / Corp / Alliance / Public.
The special thing would be that it can only be issued to Dust mercs themselves or Corps / Alliances which have Dust mercs in them.

To make sure the battles are really filled I think it should be something like this:

Private person:
Only the merc this contract was issued to can see it under "Other contracts" and is able to join alone or with a squad. And later with a whole team, as soon as we get team deploy. As soon as the merc / squad / team deployed the contract becomes public, for every merc to join. Mercs can also get assigned to this battle via Scotty. Of course to make this fun scotty would need a bit of tweaking. Unless we want to see this system abused with whole teams pubstomping blueberries all day long.

Public contracts: The contract appears for all mercs under "Other Contracts". If they chose to accept the contract they would fight for the side the contract was bought from. For example if the Eve pilot bought the Contract in the Caldari LP store, the mercs accepting it would obviously fight for Caldari. The defenders would be thrown into this match via the normal matchmaking system.

Corp / Alliance: Basically the same as public contracts. But only people in the Corp / Alliance the contract was issued to can see it. The contract becomes public as soon as the match starts (out of the warbarge)

Time?
I think instead of the typical 24h / 1 week / 2 week capsuleers should be able to determine the exact time of these battles. Kinda like in PC.

What system should be attacked / defended?
I think it's enough to tell which system should be attacked. Naming the planet and district just seems like useless overkill.

Unless you set up a defense contract. Then you would see all systems which have a attack contract set up and you are able to set up a defense contract the same way. The defense contract could even be another item you can buy in the LP store. It could even be cheaper.

Now why would a capsuleer do this? Simple: They get a big LP payout if the mercs win. If they lose on the other hand he gets nothing. I personally would suggest something like at least 20.000 LP payout for a win. But once again: These numbers obviously need some tweaking. The ability to setup defense contracts would make this a real risk. So maybe you set up a public contract in hopes for a easy big LP payout, but then somebody contracts a pro player corp to defend that district.

Of course this system isn't perfect. Especially with specific defense contracts being set up it could result in pub stomping. After all it can overwrite the matchmaking. This could count under "New Eden is harsh" though. And FW isn't there for beginners anyways. Beginners should stick to instant matches (in hopes that the matchmaking for these gets fixed). And this contract system would also enable corp battles again.

I think this would be a good addition to the matchmaking contracts, but it's not there to abolish the old system. It could do that if enough Eve players make use of it, but FW would still work, even if all Eve players decide to not use these contracts. So I guess that would be fine with CCPs idea that both games still have to work without each other. Also notice that there wouldn't be any ISK or LP flow between Eve and Dust. So that wouldn't be a problem either.