I completely agree, this is fucked up in so many ways. While NA is getting good events and missions constantly which only require T6 ships, we always get this utter [edited]and as you said, not everybody can invest their whole life into this game.
Sure, these missions should be challenging, don't want stuff for free after all, but for the many of us like me, who are at mid tier at the moment, 80% of these missions are completely out of the question. Grinding up from a T6 to T9 is not something that you can do, even in the 2 months we have, without a premium account and countless hours a day of playtime.
It's quite sad how EU tries to milk the money out of the players by forcing high tiers for the missions to get as many people as possible to buy premium accounts even though we are the biggest community out of the 3.
I would really like to hear from the community managers why we get screwed over like this all the time, but like usual there probably won't be any answer, since who wants to openly admit that they are exploiting their playerbase.