I can confirm, doing them in Summer 2019 was a Nightmare! Gate stopped spawning at exactly 13:00 Evetime back then. But even before US TZ had issues accessing the proving gate. CCP got randomly aware on that issue after I posted it in the August 2019 feedback thread. And it was known a long time ago: Abyssal PVP Gate spawn rate and stalemating
Here I made a collection of a lot of posts and threads on the forums about the issues the old proving grounds had such as gate spawn issues or stalemating. Surprisingly, nothing of these points did come up in the dev blog for these filaments. I wonder where these points such as solved meta or direct access have been brought up. It would take me wonder what was exactly going on in CCP’s mind when they thought about removing them entirely. I mean, these events could have existed among the old content without any issues, especially since these events occour like 1-2 times per month.
Also, meta in faction warfare is stale for years now. Garmurs and Comets rule in novice plexes. And CCP still decides to keep that in game. Although, FW in general needs a rework to make it more attractive and more pvp focused. I wonder, why did CCP remove the old proving grounds that had stale meta, while keeping a lot of other features such as FW, or missions/ratting in game, that had stale meta for years now? I even observed the same thing in these new provings too, after a day, meta is solved and people almost only use the ships that are known to be good. For example in the crimson proving ground the Kestrel was very dominant, followed by the Tristan and then the Punisher. Or in the Cruiser 2v2 event the Caracal and Stabber was dominant.