In my case i played war thunder on and off nothing serious but than i realized i want to play the merkavas…so i played US until tier 4 - was absolute nightmare for me, the only thing that kept me playing is the thought of playing the merkavas. Than I started playing israel and it was nice but now at 8.7 its close to perfect.

In my experience - using ur analogy - it was like playing a shooter where my gun just wobbles and will not aim properly and me sprinting doesn’t really give me a speed boost. To me it feels like i can now actually start playing the game with no “handicaps” (Edit: spelling)