It's the alpha nonsense that's convoluted. They could have just let us use this new method to upgrade pets to T5 and get all of the benefits that you get when increasing a pet by a tier. The alpha stuff isn't necessary at all. If they wanted to give you the loot speed increase without requiring that you upgrade multiple pets, they could have just made it so that as long as you have one T5 out, you get the full loot buff. Instead, they added a system where you have to select a specific pet to get the T5 buff, and no other pets can get it even if they're T5. It's also a royal pain to switch alpha's around quickly, since you make the selection when the pet isn't out. So, the system is completely crippled for using it to actually get buffs beyond the loot speed increase. It would have been far simpler to just let us have multiple T5s out at once which were all treated as T5 all the time. And all this extra complication with alpha pets does is make is so that we can't have more than one pet with a T5 talent at once. So, instead of getting 5% more XP, we get 1%.

Getting the loot speed increase is definitely nice, but PA seems to have added this alpha system only so that you couldn't actually get the benefits to talents that normally come with a new tier. It's an extra complication that just makes things worse. It wasn't at all necessary in order to give us the loot speed increase. And if all they really wanted to do was give us the loot speed increase, they could have just given us a quest that resulted in the loot speed being buffed all the time no matter which pets were out without actually having to make any pets T5. So, giving us no buffs to talents would have been easier and simpler, and giving us the full T5 buffs for talents would have been easier and simpler, but instead, they made things more complicated just so that they could restrict the T5 talent buff to a single pet at a time.