Let's talk about the theory of GCs

It does seem like on the surface, one would think that if you haven't developed a squad such as Jawas or Ewoks, you shouldn't be able to get that feat at tier X. Sometimes it's possible with less gear and swapping mods, but it seems like a pretty straightforward expectation to have. The flip side if you do have them geared is not that it's necessarily easy or even the best faction to beat the thing, but that it's doable without being frustrating. If I have relic Ewoks, I would expect to be able to do that faction feat. I don't really think that's so tall of an ask.

The fact that fleets often end up being a case of using a meta fleet with the faction hiding in reinforcements is not merely that there's a fleet disparity, but that fleets are still the red headed step child of swgoh. If you read the modifiers, it seems like they were still designed with squads in mind (talking about the leader gaining max health, etc.). It's not that cheese shouldn't be possible--for a while I remember when these things were being called Malaktic Challenges because Malak seemed to be the key to getting a lot of the feats--but that, if I have the feat faction with relic pilots, I would expect them to be able to do the battle. The problem with the fleet ones is, if I HAVEN'T worked on them, I can still cheese it with another fleet. So it seems EXTRA egregious that I still have to do that even with resources put into them.

I think it's because they never really knew what to do with fleets. Not only was their release into the game delayed, but it faced some backlash because it felt like people were relearning battles in some ways. Then they realized they needed to retool with ships 2.0, changing from five starting to three, and getting rid of multi-stage fleet battles. It still feels like there's not much reason or benefit to having four reinforcement slots at 7* other than maybe giving you a few more options, but you'd never really need them. I guess you need them for GCs so you can cheese the faction feat. I feel like they could just as easily retool the ship GCs with new feats and new modifiers so that they can make it more of a puzzle or test of your faction feat. They could even make the feat say you need the faction ships to be starting and/or with the matching capital.

But as scuba said, I'm 99% convinced that teams, planets, and feats are just spit out by a random generator.