[JeBuS]

Yes, that sounds right for the top tier solvers.
I think the most my day 2 deck can do by turn 3 is 16 personnel (+2 seeded mission specialists, but they were not usable for mission attempts in my setup) when limited by It's Only a Game; if you don't draw a downloader it's usually 14, but there are basically no limits as to which NA personnel you want to include, so a lot of your guys will be people like Lore, Rayna Kapec, etc.
In the few test draws I did, it usually beat out Maquack in terms of skills/attributes on the table. Maquack can churn out a similar number of people, but I found it more difficult to get a perfect spread to make use of all your free plays every turn . I only saw Peter's deck in action twice, but the feeling was his deck was more consistently able to use his engines to their full potential.

That sounds... not healthy for the game. Anecdotally, I'd guess that most people are comfortable with the "draw 3 / play 3" idea, as far as pace-of-game. The pace I see above comes out to "play 5 / 6". (This doesn't take into account the number of skills [ie "quality" of those plays], or free ships, events, incidents, etc.) That's significantly more than I would think most people suspect is healthy for the game.

[Smiley]

All games benefit from ramping play. So starting at 1 play and 1 draw is a good thing. I would even argue that drawing 1 all the time is a good base. Anything giving more draws should cost you plays to achieve. No seeded extras as this creates stale states for deck building.

I would argue that this even could be achieved with a rules change and less of a bunch of cards but that would be a another different discussion. =)