You are wrong, and you will realize that if you hand in more data. The progress will stick at zero for a long time, because you lost more than just the XP since Elite rank, you just don't see it yet.
Well, I already did and you're wrong. So...
Whatever.
I'm of the opinion that a lot of people saved up tons of data knowing the rewards were going up after the patch and never turned it in. So after the patch dropped they had TONS of samples they turned in and went up a lot of levels.
They are the ones that got hammered, lost levels, and are complaining.
I never did that. I turned in my data at the end of every gaming session to my carrier. I never had any "big turn ins" after the patch. So the only data I turned in was just enough to make elite because I knew ( because of common sense, of course ) that it was only a matter of time before they hit it with the nerf hammer.
So since I didn't grotesquely try to abuse the system, I was barely effected. The people crying rivers over it were the people that already had millions worth of samples before the patch ever dropped under the old values and then turned it all in at once for hundreds upon hundreds of millions of credits after the patch to game the system.
They're paying for it now and they don't like it. That's all there is to it.
All you have to do is actually read this thread. You have a guy that was a level above me that says he turned in "a couple" samples and got to Elite II and got hammered all the way back to where he came from while I was at the same level he was, turned in about 22 samples AFTER the patch that I collected AFTER the patch, got to Elite plus 34% and all I lost was the 34%.