from what some in my corp believe, it’s a means to limit alpha players access to better items than T2.
as Alphas can train to lvl5 in most things, they’ve been using the better Factional items and paying 10-1000x the price of T2 versions.
it was suggested why doesn’t CCP just increase the skill requirements of the Factional items and then they stay the same, but limited to Omega only. to be honest this would be the faster and more effective method to limit alphas access to these items.
someone even suggested that they believe CCP is trying to make the T2 great again, with only the Officer items being the only items better than T2, with Factional and Deadspace being below the T2.
now this would upset a lot of players in so many ways, just in isk alone spend of A-B type item can be well above a billion isk, only to log in to find and 5million isk T2 now is better than an Type-A Deepspace item. personally I hope they are wrong in this comment.
so as you can see there’s a lot of speculation floating around.