I am thinking completely the opposite way about all of that. Do you think that rank progression right after U14 was ok? It was so ridiculously fast that it was actually broken. And a game should have the same rules for all players. Some relevant game designer(s) at Frontier understood that, albeit late, and they adjusted the rank thresholds, which was good, but not adequate. Now that players who were stuck at 0% can see rank progression again, is good in my opinion, but not quite ideal since now those players have individual rank thresholds that can be a lot lower than for those players who worked their hidden rank up so much that they saw their progress bar advancing before update 14.02.
Payouts and ranking change all the time. No-one should feel short-changed as long as they got the rank corresponding to the credits they earned at the time they did it, and can then use the nice decals.
I got Elite Exploration quite easily because at the time passenger sightseeing missions contributed and they were very well paid, plus I enjoyed doing them. OTOH other people got it even more easily than me by following "road to riches".
I got Elite Trade the hard way, by doing trade missions etc. After that, void opals came along and other people got Elite in a few days.
I mostly did Combat Elite in normal gameplay, but towards the end Thargoids turned up and I was involved with a group saving infested systems by killing large numbers of Scouts. That easily completed the last rank for me.
Elite ranks are individual achievements which, basically, mean you play a lot. There's no need to worry about whether others encounter the same time requirement. OK, some people do worry about that, which is up to them. I do think it was a mistake for FD to acknowledge the moaning and tinker with the Exobiology rank boundaries though, and I think I'm proved right by the fact that they messed it up as described in this thread.
