The real questions to you as member of the MOD are, is there a design decision to "give an incentive for players to rush towards their final tier"?
Is that a concussions decision or is happening without being aware of it?
I can only speak for myself but I think the incentive has always been there. It is a result from Relic's core design decisions, mostly the economy system. Unlike vCoH, CoH2 has an abundance of fuel because of the standard territory points which greatly speeds up the different phases. This is amplified in team games. The game does not have very long early and mid game phases because of how quickly these get outclassed by the next phase, encouraging or even forcing players to not get caught up too much in one phase. There is nothing we can do about that without completely redesigning the economy and factions, which isn't something we'd be allowed to do at this stage. We can only work with what we got, and that is that rushing T4/armor is amongst the most powerful/reliable strategies.