We haven't seen the rules. I see a lot of people trying to analyze ships and upgrades through 1.0 eyes and think about them considering the current some past 1.0 metas. Basically, we only know what the developers have said about how things work. That's it. We don't really even get to see point costs for the majority of what they've shown so far.

As much as it seems some people want to deny it, this is a new game. Sure we probably understand the basics, but we can't go analyzing ships based on text because we haven't seen nearly enough of the updated ruleset or anywhere close to the number of abilities that will be available in the game at release. Maybe your favorite pilot got a new ability or had his or her ability reworked so it seems not as good as it was in First Edition, but we simply don't know enough of the landscape to make those assumptions. If that ship or pilot seems to have gotten rebalanced, it's likely that other ships and pilots that it was weak against AND strong against got rebalanced too.

The prospect of a game with 40+ ships and perhaps even half of them being competitively viable is unfathomable to me. It can't be everything, and that's fair. I don't expect everything to be great, but I expect much more than is playable in the current 1.0 meta.

We just don't know enough to assume anything yet. And THAT is why this is so exciting.

Removing the printed costs and upgrade bars from the cards might have another side-effect that the devs were looking for.
Maybe they didn't like that the community applied math to declare dead on arrival and clearly overpowered ships within minutes of posting every preview, months before the actual release, that more or less behaved like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Immediately classifying cards, pilots or whole expansion packs as either crap or must have.

Now they can have previews where they only show gameplay effects, not costs or upgrades. And we can wonder for months about what is good or what is bad, before we actually get to know the costs and upgrade bar on release day, leading people to give a chance to all cards and ships without prejudices?

19 minutes ago, Azrapse said:

Removing the printed costs and upgrade bars from the cards might have another side-effect that the devs were looking for.
Maybe they didn't like that the community applied math to declare dead on arrival and clearly overpowered ships within minutes of posting every preview, months before the actual release, that more or less behaved like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Immediately classifying cards, pilots or whole expansion packs as either crap or must have. 

Now they can have previews where they only show gameplay effects, not costs or upgrades. And we can wonder for months about what is good or what is bad, before we actually get to know the costs and upgrade bar on release day, leading people to give a chance to all cards and ships without prejudices?

Not even that. They can tweak the costs endlessly until they balance. DoA is itself dead.