The problem you seem to have more than anything is with the team rankings being affected by the looks of things and this is probably the area it's affected the least.
Don't forgot that you can get a vast amount of team power points from a plethora of different hardware.
Take classicplatforms for example, they bench next to no new hardware and don't have anybody with sponsors on their team, yet with some hard work and dedication the team of 16 people have managed to get to 5th place in the rankings by benching mainly older hardware.