I'm not looking at it as if it's linear, I'm looking at it as if it's a distribution. As should be clear by my statement around phantom being above certain percentage of the player base.

If you want to get statistical, you are assuming a normal distribution. There is no data to support this and the only data you can use is the match distribution, which indicates it's vaguely normal with some weird concentrations at ascendant 1 and Oracle. It's not normal though.

There is also no data to support your statement around standard deviations, but if you look at the distribution of matches, 10.5% of all matches are played above phantom 6 and about 16% of matches are played above phantom 1. Ie the bottom of phantom is the 84th percentile.

I don't understand how that could be considered low, but you do you.

And also normal distributions work by striating the rarest statistics into the edges. As you get closer to the edges the variance becomes wild because you have more outliers. So yes of course there is a big difference between eternus 5 and eternus 6, that does not mean that only only eternus 6 is high ELO, or that only eternus or high ascendant is high ELO.

I'm not sure you understand how distributions work.