So I thought I'd update this thread with progress.
I've finally hit my first Zeta upgrade. I've been following the RZ strategy. I got lucky and they added Sun Fac to guild shipments, so I've used those to unlock Sun Fac. I noticed that Slave I has a low appearance rate in the Fleet Shipments, so I made sure to buy those whenever they showed. This delayed my zeta upgrade by about ~5 days, but I think it was worth it for two reasons - one, the Slave I is quite solid in arena, and two, my support characters for squad arena weren't quite ready anyways.
For fleet arena, the conservative estimate put me at rank 201-500, and heading towards that 500 rank. The optimistic estimate put me somewhere between 100-200. It turns out both were wrong, and the conservative one was extremely off. Instead, my rank has stayed almost exactly the same - low 50's, sometimes breaking that 50 barrier when I get lucky and win 5/5 matches.
Why did this happen? My guess is that many of the other players are purchasing fleet shipments for character shards, gear, etc, and not leveling their ships as a sole priority, so my spending of fleet shipments on zeta didn't hurt my fleet. I also am guessing that we were overestimating the importance of *'ing up ships for fleet arena rank. This turns out to be an advantage for the RZ strategy, over initial estimates.
More to the question that people really care about - how did my arena rank fare? I've breached the top 10, and got my best rank in almost a month. This netted the expected gain in crystals. Additionally, this yielded the easiest GW I've had since, well, ever.
Now of course, it would be misleading to declare victory or anything of the sort of that. Both the arena rank and GW results could be the result of luck and a perspective bias. But despite some loudly-voiced negative comments (and some well-reason counter-arguments, which were greatly appreciated), initial results seem to imply RZ was a very promising choice.
Now I'm a bit stuck as to what to do, admittedly. I was hoping there would be another zeta I would want, but there really isn't. I don't have Darth Maul, Cody, Jyn, or Barriss. Darth Vader's zeta doesn't seem to help in arena and I don't need the help in tank raids. Additionally he would require a lot of work to gear up for me, as would Boba Fett. Yoda's zeta seems most promising, but after running with QGJ's zeta so far, I'm curious as to if the players claiming you need Yoda's zeta to make him work on a QGJ zeta team are speaking from experience. Almost every time I've had Yoda perform Battle Meditation he already had Foresight, thanks to his basic + QGJ's leadership.
If I were to get a zeta, I'm leaning towards Boba (and having to gear him) or Yoda, but both seem mediocre. Barriss is a distant third because of its power, but it would require gearing up of not only Barriss but two other characters to make the team work.
That leaves me with spending on ships or spending on gear. Gear seems the obvious choice because I'm still in a gear crunch and my fleet arena rank is staying pretty consistent, but I could be convinced otherwise.
