The Jove were fine because they were powerful, scary, and extremely rare. I think I can count the events with actual Jove ships involved on-grid on one hand. And then gone.
The Jove and any similarly powered things shouldn't be common sights. They should show up once in a blue moon, WTFBBQ everything within 5 jumps of a place, and then ninja vanish.
If I were mandated by CCP to come up with game content for these scary new npc assets, I'd play it more like a lore treasure hunt. Say the Drifters are back in a weakened (but still OP) state, and need 'x' of their ancient mcguffins lost to history in order to re-assemble their technology or build their death-star or whatever before they kill everyone in New Eden.
You could have a series of events, say one a month or so, where the Drifters are learning where their old tech ended up on various planets or deadspace locations or whatever. Clues are disseminated ahead of time for capsuleers to figure out where the next location is, giving them a time to form up defenses and prevent them from their goals. Think of it like 'the crucible' from Mass Effect 3 except it's the bad guys trying to build the thing.
So you have a bunch of events with people fighting to stop them (or trying to sabotage efforts), adjusting difficulty as they go. Maybe they get to build their superweapon and the last pieces they need are on like Amarr Prime or Matar or something, and they blow up the planet if the capsuleers fail. DYNAMIC CONTENT.
Anyway this sort of stuff would be great for any of the pirate factions. Give them a goal, give them places in space to try and achieve their goals, give capsuleers avenues to stop them (or help them). Sort of like the Sansha events, but with tangible game results for success or failure (this system invasion was not stopped, all the stations in this system are now exploded).
There just has to be an effort to make the game world dynamic and the npc-focused playerbase goals and objectives that have tangible results. Flipping occupancy on a bunch of lowsec systems for no permanent results is not it.
I want pirates, rogue drones, scary drifters, whatever, constantly pushing on the borders of the big 4 empires and the 90% of eve players who just shoot NPCs tasked with helping out to maintain the safety of 1.0 space, or lose it.