for the solo play progression this is advantageous, since you are constantly evolving. People are used to this by now by the sheer amount of team arena games available currently, albeit i would hope SC will kinda go its own route in this, because I think, the wot like open ended development will soon lose its magic. people after all love games where all pieces are balanced in, which makes games like battlefield much more attractive to the fast paced action crowd.
for the teamplay its abyssimal, since squadding basicly became less prominent. but since the early time of squads, squads were always treated as “better” by the devs for whatever logic, so only “better” players squadded, because they could pull it off to have fun on a mm-disadvantage; if squads would offer some rewards extra for progression, maybe things could have become better. So in that regard I fully criticise the decisionmaking, and argue one of the biggest flaws currently is the lack of connection to team pvp play by the decisionmakers.
in t3 usually the larger part of the playerbase always had enough full purple stuff. R9s still can compete up to games with R12 ships, thanks to the new module system, its just a completely different rank now. So often, with partly R9, R10 and R11 you get games which feel like strong T3 games and can be quite balanced even with less experienced teams.
at least t5 quality is steadily increasing, so is quality around R10. Meta is really interesting there, since it switches between T3 “battleline-warfare” with heavy tanked engis, long ranged fighters, adaptive bubbles and covert ops rushes, and typical T5 minmaxer blitzkrieg gameplay, like guardballs, ubercommands, and generally more faster aggressive gameplay and of course cheese builds like cruise ships or autoaim-recons, and of course including large amounts of total fail teams with spawncamping LRFs behind a typical all guard/ecm/tackler nonsense (heal? damage? objective? nah, just boost from spawn to the point on the map with the most red dots…)
I find it entertaining atm. in solo, but i miss group play, and i think, this game needs to focus blatantly on social interaction, instead of going more and more to the raid-pve-type of thing, and do everything to keep progression going even if the player has to endure a typical loss.
in the end, you know like me, sometimes, you can tell how the game will go by just take a look at the names, and its like a card game, where you just count how many '13 or '12 players you have. i think that hasnt changed much. and it probably never will, because you cant really close skill gap with game mechanics, from the old players who understand the evolution of the game and how it came to be, and those who still are ranking up ships.
If this new generation will reach veterancy, we will see how much they actually learned by the new system. sadly a lot progressed far too quick to t5 and started gameplay there.