History of Tier 8 Premium Tanks

(This is a question with a story at the start, not a comprehensive history or anything. tl;dr of my question is in the last paragraph bolded)

I started playing right when the game came out. It had maybe been around for 3 months before my guild in another game all started playing it and I jumped over to join. I have very fond memories of Easy8 platoons(and that one clan member who insisted on using the Jumbo and slowed us down!) and so on when the game was new.

Anyway, back then premiums mostly sucked. You had some really OP low tier premiums that were awkwardly tier placed — would never be competitive 1 tier higher, but had characteristics that made them OP at their tier. They're probably still OP. I don't know if low tiers have been power crept.

Tier 8 premiums for the most part were garbage for the first few years. The Lowe vs the Tiger 2 is a great example of the original Premium balance philosophy: it's not just awful, but it has a lot of characteristics that are just 10-15% worse than the Tiger 2, with a couple of advantages(accuracy) to make it feel like a different tank rather than just a nerfed version. They were intentionally under-tuned, often being strictly worse than their tier 8 tech tree counterpart, to alleviate the feeling of people "buying past the grind". Of course, back then tier 8+ was a much bigger deal and took a lot longer to get to. With all of the EXP bonuses, blueprints, etc. it now takes so much less time to get to the high tiers. Back then it was quite the task. The goal of premiums was just to make them work so you could print credits in order to continue your grind up the tech tree, and other than complaints about being able to buy your way into high tiers before you were ready the complaints about premiums were pretty minimal.

In the early release of the game we also had far fewer crew skills(just camo, repair, firefighting) so ultimately the idea of a crew trainer was not as relevant.

Some people did get frustrated with certain premiums; the KV-5 having preferential MM and being a juggernaut with only a couple of weaknesses was a common very early complaint in the game. But it was never actually OP: it had a huge frontal armor weak spot and a tier 5 gun. Learning how to damage a KV-5 while not instantly dying yourself was a rite of passage for players in tanks like the Shermans, but the KV-5 never felt imbalanced.

The Type 59 was hated, but the preferential MM where it was always top tier was really the reason: it wasn't that bad to fight against as a tier 8, it just felt like every game in your tier 6s had multiple T59s and the bouncy low profile was downright annoying to fight against as a tier 6.

That's the thing: when a tier 8 premium was annoying, it was just annoying because it was awkward to deal with and you faced 2 every game. The Super Pershing comes to mind; everyone hated it on release but it certainly wasn't because it was kicking your ass…it's just because you had to deal with penetrating it literally every game and it had a weird armor scheme.

I took a break from the game from roughly 2015-end of 2021. Since my return it seems like premium balance philosophy has changed. The release rate of premiums is WAY higher, and it seems like people legitimately believe that many of them are superior to their tech tree counterparts. I got the Skoda t56 from a Christmas box, commented to a clan member that it seemed kind of amazing and made me want to grind the tech tree, and he straight up told me "it's better than the tech tree tanks tier for tier". That seems so wild to me as a veteran who missed a few years.

Can anyone break down the history of when the premium tank design philosophy seemed to change, community reactions to that, etc? I feel like there had to be a turning point where a premium tank was released that obviously broke the "worse than tech tree" design philosophy and there had to be a reaction, right? When did that happen?

I am remembering the time I left the game: the Japanese medium prem, AMX CDC, etc. were some of the newer premium tanks and were still basically garbage that you just made work because you needed credits and crew training in those lines. The Skorpion was "annoying" because people could buy big alpha, but still clearly a mediocre tank in terms of carrying games as far as I remember. Clearly some time in the last 5 years design philosophy changed for premiums and I'm wondering when that happened and how many tanks have come since then.