Probably going to get a bit of hate from this comment, but I can understand and somewhat accept what they want to do with relic delta.
Personally it's not exactly encouraging for me to have to start planning for a lot of toons to get relic upgrades for my teams to function as they do today.
I also help with TW planning in my guild and I foresee a nightmare in trying to ensure that the right people go against the right teams to ensure we are as effective as possible when dealing with relic delta.
However despite these pains, I understand that CG is a business and they need to incentivise and reward spending for that business to function.
Currently I'm in a place where I relic toons for requirements, for raid and lately for later phase TB planets. I see no real incentive currently to increase relic levels on someone like my R7 JMK or my mostly R5 Phoenix (who have no issues handling R9 inqs). I understand this is likely not sustainable, so CG need to do something.
I honestly feel like their very long post outlines quite well how they arrived at relic delta and why that quite simple solution is probably the best way forward if they are to increase the reward for applying relic levels in a scalable way that doesn't eat all their dev time.
A lot of the criticism from the OP reads like they haven't fully grasped what they are suggesting.
Paraphrasing OP somewhat:
"RD is the easy path, makes CG just seem lazy"
The alternative to a simple scaling system is that the devs must invest a lot of time into tuning the toons on a more individual level.
The devs are not lazy, but their time is not infinite. I would rather them going a simpler route and have more time for bug fixing and new content.
"Just increase the mastery from relic levels"
So toons with dodge mastery can dodge more. That would not at all be worse, right... right?
It would introduce the new issue that some mastery will be much more impactful in scaling over other, case in point is something like dodge scaling vs. crit chance scaling. To make much steeper mastery scaling balanced, CG would likely need to rework the system significantly and in the end increasing mastery gain would just be a more complicated way to end up with the same basic result.
Most mastery includes damage and health, so more scaled mastery could mean that the R5 toon would hit as hard as before vs. the R9 toon, but with much more health/prot on the R9 toon, the lower relic toon would still need e.g. +50% as many hits to work down the R9 toon. Meanwhile the R9 toon with added damage from more mastery might only need to hit the lower relic toons a third of the times it would under the current system.
Higher mastery scaling just feels like a more complex way to end up in the same spot.
This is working under the assumption that CG do want to address the value of existing relic levels and not just adjust from R10 onwards.
"CG are nerfing lower relics into the ground"
They are not nerfing lower relics in and of themselves. They are nerfing lower relics when fighting higher relics. Something like R5 will be buffed when fighting R3 and nerfed when fighting R7.
OP's solution option 1 does somewhat the same as the mastery delta would be increased. As OP state, their suggestion is more moderate than what is right now being tested, but I think we can be assured that CG do intend to increase the value of applying more relics, so if they went with OP's suggestion 1, they would need to increase the deltas in mastery gains and then... well, see above point of why I think simply tweaking the damage done/received seems preferable on the whole.
"Just tweak R10 and above"
That would not solve the fundamental issue that CG see too little uptake of higher relics since this would likely have two effects.
Only the very top end would heavily engage with R10, since it's expensive to get to R9 and there's limited benefit unless you go all the way.
Outside the very top players would start to min/max and applying R10 to select key toons, which is the behaviour CG tries to get us away from.
I'm sure they want to make you spend more money and when they can't get what they want they will withdraw this update. We saw this in the Marvel Strike Force game but it will be too late, they are already on a tightrope and this will be the end of them and SWGOH unfortunately.
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