No grind linearity?

I don’t know. Maybe my problem is I’m too competitive. The play/pay to win elements are pretty strong sometimes and you need to try and counter them yourself or get farmed. You can get by with just bolt actions when the lobbies aren’t too sweaty. But run across a player with nothing but 20+ automatic weapon units and you will have a bad time unless your squads have a few automatics as well. Same goes for vehicles and vehicle counters you can bring into matches.

Too make matters worse. Resources spent at low and mi campaign levels are basically wasted. You can’t (reliably) recycle Tier 1 troops. They are just objectively inferior to Tier 2 and always will be. Small med/grenade/ammo bags are eventually obsolete once you unlock large bags. I don’t think backpack items are recyclable either, like T1 troopers.

True but not completely. Small bags are still useful on someone who doesn’t have a large one. By the point you get to tier 2 soldiers, you can have a number of level 5 tier 1 soldiers. They are quite useful till you get your squads fully kitted, which in my case never happened by the time I’ve got to level 25. Like tier 1 pilots are kind of useless but the rest of the guys have utility, like they already can carry big backpacks while your tier 2 are still training to unlock it.