Your point is built on a false premise. Most early metas were built on characters who were farmable from cantina nodes or the easy stores (old Ben, wiggs, sthan, QGJ). It wasn’t until recently that the meta came to dominated by the latest legendary release. Whales had an advantage because spending allowed them to easily adjust to new changes in the game (mods being released/spliced, new meta shifts due to releases and reworks, new content like raids, etc)
The game model has always been that every character gets released to F2P eventually, and Revan was no exception. The difference is that Revans kit is significantly stronger than most other characters, which allowed someone who unlocked him on the second try to climb into the top 50, because all that existed at that level were mirror matches
