Faction Warfare - Thoughts

I've just finished about 3 months of fighting in faction warfare. I must say the experience has taught me much about PvP. It's time to get my thoughts in order and contemplate what I have learned about PvP in faction warfare and the mechanics of faction warfare itself.

1. This can be an excellent tool to tech small gang warfare. It won't teach you much about the larger (Full wing and up) fleets but it will help with the smaller skirmish style warfare. One of the main reasons for this is the pull out of the pirates from FW. They were the ones who were providing the BS backbone for the larger fleets. On the flip side such BS fleets are rather easy to dodge.
2. I can confirm that frigates can make a very significant contribution to any FW op, so newbies should not feel "I can't PvP cuz I don't have the skillz". You need to PvP to learn the pilot skills necessary to fight in PvP. Learn how to scout, learn how to tackle, learn how to get out of dodge. Learn it in a frigate.
3. There is a significant lack of rewards in faction warfare. Most pilots spent over 50% of their time in high sec doing missions. Although there are FW missions these tended not to be run as you would need significant coordination with other pilots to make a go of them. This is the major failing of FW. Unless a pilot specificaly tailored his fighting to his budget and income stream he would be out of the fight for significant stretches of time.
4. FW fleets are harder to run than corp or alliance fleets. This is due to the at times dispersed nature of these fleets. And at times due to the fleet members doing more what they want than what the FC wants.
5. The plex mechanics themselves weren't too bad but the respawn mechanics and the NPC AI leave a lot to be desired. I think a slightly different mechanic would have made things much more interesting (ooo thoughts percolating - must note down). The actual deaspace mechanics and warp gate limitiation part of the mechanics work wonderfully however. Some of the more interesting battles have happend in and arround the FW complexes so that part of the mechanic is a win.
6. Due to the mechanics of plex re-spawning and now that they are for the most part understood and more of the remaining FW pilots grasp the mechanics, it is VERY difficult to make solar systems switch hands.
7. The lack of rewards is a big problem with FW. Without an integral income stream, most pilots have to spend a good portion of their time NOT PvP'ing but making isk one way or another.
8. The more join up randomly style of PvP means that when you have the hulls available and ready there just about always something happening somewhere. As others from 0.0 have commented, this is great for logging on and going straight to where some action is. But the quality of the fleets and action can vary enormously.

Those are my general thoughts on Faction Warfare. All in all it still feels half complete and I would have prefered a different system occupancy/control mechanism I would also have prefered more consequences/rewards for controling the system. CCP keeps telling us that there is more they want to do with FW. That's fine and dandy but they need to get off their asses and start doing it. The system will have been in effect for 6 months soon, it's time for CCP to do a bit of a revision on how it's all working and maybee tweek a few things. I would like for them to analyze total time spent in the low sec areas of FW and time spent elsewhere for all pilots in FW. This may or may not be imposible to do with the existing database but I think it would be revealing.