The solution is to set the academy to 15 million SP.

Meta lock the academy to STD/MLT suits, weapons, vehicles and modules.

Allow the academy players to queue in the regular matches to test their chosen new ADV/PRO fits in standard matches when they choose to.

That way most newer players can begin to take tentative steps into the shark tank at their level of comfort. If they stick around for easy mode they get dumped in with the sharks forever at fifteen million and one SP.

If said player has a character at 20 million SP or higher, their alt gets dropped in with the sharks at 5 million SP.

I think reducing the meta in those extended academy matches too much would be bad, because it would take away one of the biggest perks of the game, skilling into shiny stuff and use it. Though core skills are much better for low sp players, they will want to use higher tier gear. So at least allow them everything below LV5 stuff. So they can have all advanced links/hives and weapons. Otherwise these gamemodes would be to boring.

As I said, NO LV5 STUFF, that means, everything BELOW proto would be OK.

If you take the skilling into shiney stuff completely out of the one gamemode that these newberrys would enjoy, you just overdo it.

If the only choice is running Militia or getting stomped, they would still leave the game.

No, i just gave you a simplified answer to your question, stating that taking the gear advancement out of the noobmode, would make it very bland.

I have made a gradual progression suggestion before, and that is the only way in my opinion, to give the newberries a chance to grow with the game.
The only thing they would miss, is proto gear and above.
In my suggestion a 1mil player would meet a sub 2mil player at most, a 2mil player would meet a sub 4mil player at most.
So stomping would never be as bad as it is now.

1-2 mil variation isn't enough to give new players an idea on where the progression in the game can go.

first tier you can go up to 4 mil SP without breaking anything honestly matchmaking that way. But the problem isn't that your idea is inherently bad.

The problem is that the playerbase is not large enough to stagger out the matchmaking to exclude small slices of the community from one another. If we somehow managed to see the day that DUST magically became an excellent game and we suddenly tripled the average base population, yeah. I can see it.

But we need more bodies before we can start pie-slicing out those small groups together.