Approaching galactic conquest as free to play

You are changing your argument now.
You are talking about old units now.

I don't think that they ever specified new units. They were just talking about having a specific unit that is required to finish a feat, where if you don't have that unit, the feat is utterly impossible. And there are feats like that, and sometimes there are enough feats like that that folks on the lower end of Hard Conquest eligibility may find red crate literally impossible.

I think that we as readers just assumed that they were only talking about the tip-of-the-spear units. It was a misperception, not a change in argument.