Ye, the current structure sort of encourages spaced out or casual play. There’s often not really anything stopping people from pushing as hard as they want as early as they want, though, and the first few weeks are tuning, bug fixes, playing alts, trying pve and pvp, etc.
I don’t know. It’s not perfect but I kind of like it. 
Although maybe 3s could use a bit of an early season bump mmr wise. Maybe uncap at like 4-6 weeks when we’re all nearly full conquest including bloody token pieces.