I just re-read your post. You might be right about the impact of ranked. My hope is that the impact of rank is not as dramatic. There won't be any way to know, but if I was designing a system, I'd more or less equally weight shine and rank. That way, mediocre players with high shine could earn similarly to star players with low shine.

Even if your interpretation is correct, I think 2-3 decent 1 drop diamonds is still probably the way to go to keep your win % as high as possible.

Fun to speculate.