What if when night city arrives it has the same 3 difficulties as the other cosmos worlds? What if easy is tuned to be somewhat challenging even with maxed toons? Could be the relics are meant to be able to progress through that.

Yes, I've bought relics as I'm sure many people have. Only a few players have really large stockpiles of ICs would be my guess. The most I ever had at one time was about 14k, but wasn't even close to that when the update came. So while there is some advantage, it's not huge and someone who plays more PvP than I do could probably quickly close the gap. The guys with more ICs also play more which means they'd beat me anyway.

As for the trooper system and new content I'm going to stay optimistic. With the tour starting in May I'm hoping there is content designed to tie in meaning NF has hard deadlines to get some of this done.

Time will tell and could be either one of is right.