I'll try and keep it simple because if I elaborated on it a huge amount I'd probably stir up a shit storm depending on who's reading this thread. The basics is this, RPG systems aren't balanced and can never be balanced because these kind of systems were designed for going up against NPCs and not other players. The only way to make the balance acceptable would be to make all the upgrades you get fairly 'useless' where there are only tiny differences in statistics and the starter weapons are just as good.
For instance using Planetside 2 as an example unless they have done the above since I left you will find yourself getting slaughtered constantly by whatever can do the highest damage, usually in games like Planetside 2 that tends to be items that you pay real money for, because the devs have to reward the players who give them money over the free players right? When it comes to item shops you're paying for in game cheats, you get faster resource gains, experience and you can progress much faster than somebody who hasn't gotten suckered into the system. Going by memory though because the designers hadn't properly designed the game and thought about what they were doing there were tons of complaints by people about the infiltrator class, specifically though they were complaining about the New Conglomerate, because guess what? They did the highest amount of damage out of all the three factions so they ended up dominating a lot of map.
Note: I say this having played the closed beta and early release so it may be as clusterfucked anymore but because this is SOE we're talking about I doubt they're going to have suddenly changed their attitudes in just a few months.
You are quite right in these few aspects, however, I can tell you that a lot has happened seen closed beta
