Of course the rewards aren't equal. If you can't earn better rewards by improving your roster over time, why would you improve your roster?
But fortunately for you (and unfortunately for the relevance of your post) the massive changes coming to the game over the next few weeks are going to make things much closer to even for new toons. For legacy toons you'll still have to slowly boost gear using existing systems, but new toons will use an entirely different systems (during the era they're released).
Capital Games Team
