A lot of this game is about roleplaying, so I would politely disagree with you. I think that the officer system could be good for roleplay, but it is too difficult to keep track of multitudes of officers to keep it fun.
Something you should be aware of is that we've been here before: Aurora started out keeping dead or retired officers. There was a general consensus that all it resulted in was a ton of noise with very little signal (signal being the "interesting" officers that you would actually want to remember), so Steve took it out. I saw a good idea go by a year or two ago for how to put it back in: basically it would keep dead officers in a holding bin for a short time, allowing you to flag them for permanently remembering. IIRC, this idea came up while Steve was focusing on things other than Aurora, which is probably why he didn't jump on it and run with it. If he were to put it back in, it should probably be on a option so that people who did't want to mess with it could turn it completely off.
I suspect this is the long version of what waresky was trying to say
John