just fucking buy it. the outrage is wildly overblown. if you feel oppressed by the loot boxes, return it within the return window (24hours after you first launch the game). this is all you have to do for the progression to feel completely in your control:

1) buy hero or starfighter crates based on whichever mode you prefer more of the two (not trooper crates, they cost almost 2x) 2) look at whatever cards you get in a crate as a bonus 3) focus on the crafting parts you get from crates instead. you're guaranteed 35-50 or so each crate. 4) craft exactly what you want and ignore rng altogether.

that's it. everyone bitching hasn't actually played/figured this out yet, but once you do you will not have any issues getting the cards you want. blues are almost as good as epics in literally almost every situation so don't worry about getting cards higher than blue unless it's something really significant (like the 40% torpedo dmg vs. the 20% at blue). just consider purples a longer term goal for whatever build you like to run and focus on blues. look through the entire card collection yourself and you'll see a ton of the purples are really not worth crafting. it costs more to craft a purple (480) than it does to go from nothing to blue (240). the scary math people have been posting factors in that huge 480 part jump making everything sound a lot worse than it actually is.

you have nothing to lose. you can return it within 24 hours. if what i've explained to you here doesn't make the progression feel OK for you then just return it nbd.