Returning players being punished, badly.

The design of squad and fleet arena is ancient and awful and reasonable ideas have been proposed who knows how many times at this point. If anyone from CG actually reads the forums, they've seen that feedback and ignored it. More likely, they don't read the forums and we're just talking at each other here. The only type of feedback that has resulted in any sort of remotely corresponding in-game changes have been the google forms surveys and there's never been one about fleet arena, to my best recollection. 

I think you're more likely to get some kind of acknowledgement if you @ meathead on the SWGOH events discord server. These new forums are so awful to use that I wouldn't be surprised CG themselves never want to look at them. I suspect CG were pushed by higher ups at EA to consolidate and centralize and that's why the old forums, which were perfectly functional and much better to browse, were abandoned for this... thing.