One of the main arguments against CoH 2 being pay-to-win (or-get-lucky-drops-to-win) is the claim that new commanders simply offer additional ways to play, rather than being actually better (some would argue that is already a significant advantage, but that is not the point of this topic).
However, that implies that:
1. The performance of all commanders is comparable, and choosing one over the other does not offer a significant advantage
in the majority of situations/matchups. That is, some commanders should be better in certain situations, but all commanders should have an approximately equally sized niche of usage.
2. Choosing a specific commander over another commander (or simply over not using a commander) should require approximately equal levels of adaptation to one's opponent's strategy across all commanders.
There are several commanders for which these statements are, in my opinion, obviously false.
You'll very rarely (never) see a high level player in a serious match that would choose, for example,
Joint Operations doctrine instead of
Spearhead doctrine. Or, as Soviets,
NKVD or
Defensive instead of, frankly, anything.
In addition, even if they are not necessarily better, some commanders (incidentally, the expensive ones) bring a much greater degree of variation to an army's potential strategy and build orders, and consequently require a much greater adaptation in their opponent's strategy to counter them, than others. That's especially true of commanders with 0 CP call-ins, and some of the infantry call-ins, which may completely replace stock units as baseline infantry.
As an example, you wouldn't much care whether your opponent has chosen
Blitzkrieg or
Mechanized Tactics. However, facing an OKW opponent with the Luftwaffe commander often requires quite a different approach to a Breakthrough doctrine one.
I think these issues arise mainly from the early commanders having the same reshuffled abilities on one hand (though there are already favorites among the WFA commanders, too), and on the other some abilities pretty much never being used, or simply having a significantly lower impact on the match than call-ins (Armored Vehicle Detection, Tank Traps, Relief Infantry, etc). I wish that before pumping out the next wave of fancy new commanders Relic would take some time to work on the old ones, which they sort of started doing at one time with Soviet Reserve Army (by introducing Irregulars) and German Mechanized (grens in halftrack). There's an ever growing gap between the number of commanders in game and the number of commanders that are actual viable choices, especially in high-level 1v1.
(thanks to gotrunks712 for the commander pictures)