"Stardust: does it contribute to the gym meta stagnation?"

#PokemonGO: It's old news that the bulk of top defenders/attackers used by gym goers come from the same small pool. And I'm not here to argue that every pokemon should be equal in viability (i.e., everyone should be Tier 1!).But in thinking about what contributes to only a handful of pokemon being regularly used, I am wondering: does stardust help the game or just exacerbate the meta issues? Phrased differently, would the gym meta be better if stardust was removed?Whether stardust is actually a scarce resource has been discussed at length already (e.g., http://ift.tt/2cHQBNW ). The consensus seems to be: at higher levels, you will have plenty of stardust to keep your "A" team powered up, and the real limiting resource is candy.For example, I know that I currently have no issues keeping my vapes topped off to my level, as I have plenty of stardust and plenty of eevee candy. However, I cannot max out all of my T1 pokemon (Dragonite/Snorlax/Lapras) -- not because of stardust, but because I can't get enough candy for all of them.That said, I still can't go and max out a bunch of non-"A team" pokemon because then I WOULD run out of stardust. So I end up saving it for my core team... which ends up looking like every other player's core team.HOWEVER, there are a lot of pokemon that I have no issues finding candy for, from Pidgeot to Jolteon, that I would consider pumping up and using... if I didn't have to spend stardust.And that's not limited to attackers. For example, my Rock Slide Omastar is Tier 2 defender that I'm not going to pump dust into right now. But if I could pump him up to CP2k+ without needing to waste dust (and only candy), then I might do so and plop him in gyms more often... which would make things a bit more interesting for everyone.And it seems like the issue is going to get worse as more people are powering from 30->40 where stardust scales massively. It's not a big deal to get the 86 candy to take a Pidgeot from 30-40, but 170,000 dust will still give people pause. Whereas few people are going to blink at the dust cost to power up T1 attackers/defenders, and the grind will be for Snorlax/Lapras/Dratini candy.tl;dr it seems that stardust just limits powering up of lower-tier pokemon who have plentiful candy, which has no effect on the T1/1.5 pokemon that already dominate the metagame.Thoughts? Would it be better if stardust cost to power up was linked to CP instead of pokemon level? via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2cXQKuS