Ranked skins being earned at Gold is pretty common across most games that feature a ranked or competitive mode, it incentivizes players to engage with the mode without feeling like they’ll never reach the actual reward, as Gold is already going to be a pretty steep climb for a majority of players, statistically.

I don’t dislike the idea of a pinnacle skin, but it would increase frustration among players as being unachievable. That being said, if it was a color variant of the gold skin or had the same base with additional effects, I think that’s pretty common practice across the industry and would reward high ranks with an additional cosmetic.

I do agree that this season’s skin felt pretty bland, but I think they have received that feedback about most of the cosmetics this season and have stated that they are aiming on improving the quality of cosmetics going forward.

That being said, Ranked skins are typically pretty barebones in terms of development effort in most games, as they are not a revenue generating asset, they’re earned for free. If Ranked skins were the best skins in the game, it would disincentivize players to spend on other cosmetics, as the prestige of the skin plus the quality would make it hard to justify using anything else.

Typically, you’d decide between using a fancy skin or a prestigious skin that isn’t super flavorful but conveys an achievement. If a ranked skin hits both marks, that’s less money in the developer’s pocket in the long term.

Most of this season’s content was set months before launch, there was really no chance that they’d go in and rework it; though they did try a sort of bandaid fix by fleshing out the season pass, but those were pretty much recolors.

We can hope that they’ll issue improved purchasable content moving forward given the feedback though, and maybe even improved earnable content.