I'm not sure about the proposed cost or 5th tier, but more research would be good. Perhaps more faction specific content? And what about doing the reverse e.g. allowing for a research cap to be set at match creation e.g. Tier 2 and up tech cannot be researched thus limiting factions to Tier 0 and Tier 1 ships?
More variety is good, yes, but the latest DLC is one ship per faction, so maybe that's considered a poor investment of time for money?
There's already 26 maps with 50+ planets. How many more do you want?
And since it's on the topic how about changing how SoaSE2 tracks your best win? The current model SoaSE2 only records the highest difficulty you've beaten a map on. Win on Impossible and that's it. Sure there's over 50 maps, and that'll take a while, but once you've beaten the map, with whichever faction and settings you like, that's it, you have your angry pink skill to show off.

How about replacing this single icon with badges for each of the 6 factions (8 with the 4th race?) and individually track the difficulty you've beaten each map on? That would mean each map would have 6 or 8 possible play throughs giving a total of over 400 wins to beat everything on impossible!
And yes I'm aware 17 of the map options are random. SoaSE2 still tracks what AI you've beaten those on.
I was going to do this in a separate thread but keep getting an ERROR for site owner: Invalid domain for site key when trying to create a new post.