Gaijin has made it clear that it often relies on statistics as a means of balance, and some of the more vocal and veteran members of the community have voiced issue with that decision. While on paper it seems perfectly reasonable, beyond earning points, and KD ratios there are vehicle specific traits that have to be put into consideration. It seems like Gaijin might be relying on statistics primarily because they don’t want to go to the effort of playing these vehicles and coming to a consensus utilizing various factors.
Some players have brought up the fact that minor nations are in a particularly bad state regarding balancing, especially nations such as Britain, France, Japan, Israel etc and its likely because the playerbase for those nations are more experienced, which creates a domino effect of poor balancing decisions that continue to keep those nations in the shadow of the major powers.
The poor balancing decision is mostly the frequent overestimation of their respective vehicles capabilities based on superficial statistics, resulting in a higher BR than what should be given. Because of this, important factors that make a vehicle good or bad are being overlooked. It can be observed that lower tier vehicles are more likely to receive favorable BR treatment across most nations because noobs heavily influence the statistics. This results in powerful vehicles being placed at BRs below what they probably should. In my opinion such examples include the later variants of Panzer 4s, some of the early Shermans and T-34s as well. These vehicles are extremely meta at the low BRs and minor nations medium tanks are often placed at the same BRs or oftentimes higher for some reason despite not being as capable, there are of course many other examples including aircraft like the F4U-1A. Minor nations having to struggle through poor balancing decisions and neglect from Gaijin results in them being played by primarily experienced or long-time players or people who are having to play the game to a higher skill grade to succeed. They already have low player counts due to the fact that most of the minor nations are not as iconic or renowned for their tank history or prowess. Population of players of certain nationalities also plays a part.
And because your average player is probably avoiding them, because in the current state they sort of suck, this also leads to a possible decrease in revenue through premiums, which again circles back to them being neglected, such as massive BR gaps that can easily be filled in, or a higher incident of premium vehicles that really should have been tech tree vehicles. Basically the statistic-based balancing results in a domino effect of unreasonable balancing choices that hit minor nations the most and prevent them from being as good as they potentially can be. Its quite easy to say that if a certain Japanese or French or British vehicle were German or Russian, it would mysteriously be at a lower BR and there have genuinely been cases and perhaps still are, where identical variants of vehicles in minor trees have a bafflingly higher battle rating.
My idea is that Gaijin really needs to stop filling up the leaking bucket with fancy top tier toys like they have done non stop over and over the past few years and for once actually patch up massive BR bracket jumps in minor trees especially. Some trees can see enormous literal 4.0 jumps in some areas when there are definitely vehicles that can be put there. I would also suggest that some more thought and experience is put into these BR changes, beyond just statistics, as very frequently the changes seem to be an internal competition within Gaijin to make the worst BR changes list ever.