Player since launch day 2014 here.
I don't usually voice my opinion on here, but have to get it off my chest. And I don't mean to ruffle any feathers, this is purely my opinion.
First, let's get the personal experience and opinion out of the way:
Powerplay 2.0 is a huge dissappointment so far for me.
A pile, nay, a mountain of tedious, mind numbingly boring grind to achieve absolutely nothing for months if you are a casual player.
My experience, and I'm sure this is most people's:
Settle into something. "We have disabled merits for..."
Change your tactic to something else. "We have disabled merits for..."
Third time is the charm, surely?! "We have disabled merits for..."
Every single time the mountain seems to get a bit less tall, more hurdles are put in place to make it seem 10 times further away.
Sure, it's new and needs to be tweaked and balanced. Well, I'm sorry but shouldn't that have been done in house, not by using your player base as unpaid beta testers (as usual)?
Dear devs, you do your best to create something new and adding new layers. I appreciate that greatly, don't get me wrong. But you do not seem to understand the experience of playing your own game. You should really test and balance your creations before adding them to the game. But you don't. I've seen this time after time after time for a decade, and you never ever seem to learn from experience. People have been pointing this out for years. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but this has frustrated me for a very long time. Elite Dangerous is great, it's the only game I always come back to. But it's exactly this that keeps pushing me away from it.
That aside....
Here is my real (and structural) problem with this system:
After months of power play rank grind, you finally reach the top. And just at that point you find out you want to do something else than what you currently have bonuses for with your power.
What now?
Back to square one? Back to more months of the same? Did you ever consider this is a sandbox, where you can play your own way? Wasn't that the slogan at some point?
-This whole system pushes people into always doing the same thing in order to get bonuses for always doing the same thing.-
What will that accomplish? The way I see it, it will burn people out and turn them away from the game.
Even if you make it "significantly less X or significantly more Y", it will still be the same system that will always more or less dictate what you do in game, and restrict other activities.