I think premiums work best when they are slightly worse than a tech tree variant, but you get increased RP and SL for playing them as a trade-off.
Right now as things stand, I don’t really understand the purpose of grinding the F-14B if someone owns the premium F-14D.
Both are 13.0 in Air RB and have essentially the same flight performance, AIM-9Ms and AIM-7Ms. However, the F-14D also gets the much more capable AN/APG-71 radar/IRST suite and the AIM-54C+ instead of the F-14B’s AIM-54C.
So where is the tradeoff?
I’m completely fine with premium vehicles being good but putting a more capable version of an iconic aircraft behind a paywall while leaving the inferior version in the Tech Tree hurts the incentive to actually grind and progress through the game.
This is something I worry about long-term. If premium vehicles increasingly become direct upgrades over their Tech Tree counterparts, eventually the question becomes: why grind the vehicle at all when you can simply buy the better one?
I’d much rather see an equivalent F-14D/F-14D(R) available in the Tech Tree, or otherwise give the F-14B a meaningful niche relative to the premium.