I agree with pretty much everything in the OP.
I would also like to ask attention to how the trig-exclusive standing requirements completely screwed up half of the participants in Chapter 3. Our current situation is we have assets in systems where our enemies can freely take gates but we don’t even have static wormholes. Us defending is a game of luck and attacking back we are seriously disadvantaged.
I for one sort of understand wanting to give exclusive content to participants in the previous stage. However, they wrote a deterministic outcome to a two-sided conflict and then rewarded only those participants who flew on the same side as devs.