I'm not sure I follow this argument, and the bolded part in particular.
If I understood you correctly, your claim was that we could deal with our current conflicts with our current art toolkit - but that any harder conflicts are somehow gated by higher cultivation. What makes you think this is the case? I don't think we've see missions or the like which require a given cultivation within a Stage, so whether we are at Mid-Silver or Late-Silver, I expect the same challenges to be available to us.
They're not gated directly; the same challenges are available, but for the most part we have control of when/if we face those challenges, and our assessment of our own competence is the 'gate'. To give a relevant example, there's currently a "fight 15 grade 2 spirit beasts" action available, since we know where they are and they're sitting on a prize we want.
My position is that we both can and should delay in taking such difficult missions until we've both reached late yellow/silver and gotten combat arts which require late yellow/silver to learn. That's the point at which we rely on greater prowess to take on greater challenges for greater rewards; until then there's no need to be overbold and we can focus on things which we reasonably believe to be well within our existing skills- because there's no lack of profit to be had there.
You are correct in that if we don't need to worry about time spent cultivating combat arts (and opening the requisite meridians), we do have enough time for both EPC, Physical, Spiritual, and exploration/missions. However, I would note that this takes us basically all of our actions. However, do note that this all rests on the claim that putting off cultivating arts as long as we need to is fine. And while I do have confidence in Ling Qi's competence, I also expect that we are going to be facing a variety of challenges, some of which will exceed our current capabilities. More combat power means we can do more optional objectives, take harder missions, and survive greater dangers if we happen to stumble upon them. So I definitely don't think that combat arts can safely be dismissed.
More combat power does mean we can survive greater dangers... but a lot of arts that we'll be getting don't actually increase our practical ability to complete harder missions or optional objectives. Just look at our recent engagements for this and extrapolate what might have been different if we'd had the ability to spend a few qi to kill something quickly, for example; we'd still need to flee the wolves, snow girl effectively lost to our utility and mobility arts rather than combat power, in the fight against the Earthroot Bats Ling Qi literally decided not to bother using even all of FVM because she believed the battle to be well in hand without it so she might as well save qi, and against the mimic worm it would just have cost us more qi, since we could already kill it with near-flawless careful efficiency.
Further, the point at which we can actually take harder missions is murky. Can we take a "hunt a peak stage 2 spirit beast" mission right now? What if we had an art that lets us soak physical damage? What if we had an art that makes the target forget the last five minutes, or one that wreathes our weapon with lightning? How much of a difference will these things
actually make? It's so difficult to tell that it could be none or total- so if we want to gamble for great rewards, we'll take that mission whether we have those extra three arts or not- and perhaps overextend to great cost from estimating our prowess poorly relative to the challenge. And if we don't want to gamble, we'll hold off and do something which we're actually sure we can do- and perhaps foolishly pass up great profit from our caution.
I'm simply not willing to trust ourselves to new and shiny arts before we have something nice and reliable, like autosuccesses, backing them up. The one art/meridian roll per week will be enough to keep us from crashing and burning in forced or unexpected fights as we advance ourselves and get a steady trickle of resources over the next couple months; after that we can focus upon fleshing out and diversifying our combat abilities to become truly dangerous, complete with the advantages that being late-stage bring.
