5 hours ago, Icelom said:

No matter how you slice it, higher initiative is a crutch to help compensate for poor flying. (At all skill levels).

Alternatively, it's a way to maximize your win chances, which is what you want to do in a tournament. There is no prize for playing the most difficult squad, only the best performing one.

IMO, the reason why so many effective playstyles over the years have gotten this kind of bad labels is because the best way to win at X-wing is to play as little X-wing as possible. If X-wing is a game of guessing your opponent's moves and rolling dice at him, many winning squads seem to revolve around reducing/eliminating the need to guess by using high initiative and/or ships with more firing arcs and reducing the impact of dice rolls by having multiple modifiers.

16 hours ago, Brunas said:

There aren't actually more i5s, they're just over-represented in what people are playing. Pilot counts by initiative:

1 - 26

2 - 43

3 - 57

4- 67

5 - 29

6 - 8

Well again I think this points out to the same issue with 1st edition Pilot Skill and that is the smile shape of the power curve. The most powerful pilot skill was at the ends (0-1 & 9-12).

So with this breakdown FFG is aware that Int 6 is very powerful so it seems like they kept the 8 pilots on a tight leash, so with no good pilots at Int 6 the next best thing is showing up and that is 5.

I am sort of okay with this as well it keeps Int 6 as a foil. Sure the best pilots are Int 5 but there is a chance someone could have squeezed in an int 6 and it can serve as a counter play much like Han was for Whisper. The only problem is that once again the middle values (Int 3 &4) are left out in the cold.