I think the list is good for players who want to play Code 1 with any faction they like. Veteran players may choose to include rules from N3 as they wish. Not all troop types written in this list have to be valid for your games. House rule as you please. Why not. I think CB had good reasons not to include many rules. I am happy that there are no fireteams, for example. I only miss the smoke grenades and motorbikes. I also think CB had their own good reasons not to include all the units, going as far as limiting the factions to four. They do not want to confuse new players with too many units. The lower point costs and fewer amount of skills also leave fewer options. It may be wise for them to introduce the other factions later for business or for playtesting reasons, who knows. People should not jump to the conclusion that they know better than the people who design the games and run the business. We are not aware of all the details.
The lack of factions is an obstacle as far as i can observe, i'm trying to push Infinity in my local area, with moderate success, Code 1 is great for that but for instance there most players i know are only interested in Ariadna or the JSA or the Nomads or ALEPH, in the new players only one is playing YJ and myself i'm playing OSS and MAF everyone else is aiming to play something that falls outside the scope of C1. Unofficial lists are great and all but what am I supposed to tell peoples "Well maybe hold off until the faction you want to play hits C1 or jump in anyway and we'll haphrazardly work something out." And the delays just put off the whole thing and peoples quickly move on to something they can play without extra hoops to jump through. I think it was really a poor move from CB to not at least have spread the C1 factions to all vanilla +JSA (and maybe Spiral Corp too) even if the big 4 only benefited from the super tight cookie cutter release plans and stuff. And i won't claim to know better than CB, they sure had extremely valid reasons to do it, but i'll still question it, and the excuse of "Oh they did that because peoples are too dumb to handle so many options" is... Not a line of thought i have anything positive or kind to say about.
There is more to game balancing than to balance the individual units. It is also about how many units of a specific skillset a faction is supposed to have, etc. Because there are less skill, units which are different in N4 will be identical in C1. C1 makes it harder for both the units and the entire factions to be different to each other.
