I don't think AE should have any link to the actual game at all. No XP, no inf, no kill credits, nothing. The only reward should be tickets, which you use to buy thinks things to use in AE, and AE-related badges (not bought with tickets - earned as they were already). That way the farmers go find something else to do, and their crap eventually disappears...and the stories remain, the things that the devs wanted to encourage in the first place.
I don't think it should be
totally disconnected. I can see where running AE missions would get you XP, and perhaps inspirations -- it's a
simulation, and we see a wide variety of skills for which people are using simulations to hone their skills. Recipes, enhancements, and salvage? No; if there were a way to drag an electronic simulation of, say, a magical artifact into the 'real world' the economy would have been ruined in short order. Influence? Again, no; influence -- and it's variants -- represented, at least according to the devs, your ability to get other people to do things for you, whether from respect for your actions, fear of what you might do to them, or through the intel you have that they want. No matter how many electronic Reichsmen you defeat, no matter how skilled with your powers that your practice has made you, nothing you do inside an AE mission has any bearing on the 'real world' -- if you show up in Paragon City, walk into the AE building, and don't come out until you're 50, you may be highly skilled, but neither the city, nor the movers and shakers in it, have any idea who you are. The tickets? It was convenient to be able to go to the AE and swap tickets for a
known payoff, instead of grinding some unknown number of missions for a chance at getting it or paying what the inflated-cost-du-jour is from the AH. And you could argue that the tickets are a competitive payout, the way electronic gaming has been going. Badges and achievements? Part of the purpose of being recognized for defeating, say, Freakshow Tanks was being
seen defeating them; crawling into your electronic navel doesn't tell the public anything about you, no matter how many electronic ghosts you send to the Zig.