I think the issue is playability. While the harder elements may appeal to an established group of fairly hard core players, if you make the game too hard, you will drive away lesser players and I think make it very hard for new players to come in and have any hope of getting to, let's say Rear Admiral (I see that that charity donations have increased, one or two orders of magnitude and the increased amounts only yield the same as before, this is being posted on the boards) or try to get up better ships. I've got my rank and ships, but to say to a newer player "suck it up", or "grow a pair" is, I think, hypocritical because players that have been in the game for some time obtained their assets under way different circumstances.
Player skill distribution can easily be plotted on a bell-shaped curve, one end highly skilled, one not so skilled, the majority fall somewhere in-between. If you make it hard, what is the size of your client base? If you make to easy, what's the point of the game? You have to have broad appeal to make it fiscally sound, after all you are selling something and you want to have a large client base.
So right now it appears we have polarizing views here and on the other boards, "too hard" or "it's great", that doesn't sound like a good business model to me, and as a player of some(?) skill, I think the swing taken by the latest upgrade makes it not appealing to me or too large a part of the client base. Only my opinion and observations. And the grinding is gotten worse, I won't bore you with my experience in trying to obtain a lowly 1st mod to an MC by Todd "Blaster".
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