Pidgeot - Personally I would prefer the refund of my 1,000,000 valor for the dragon commander plane. At 600K/600K it's much worse than the 980K/840K I would have gotten for buying 28 Tech F2 Lightning with the same 1M valor. Or the 1.16M/996K I would have gotten using that valor as part of buying a 50-pack of Tech F2s.
The big a** plane looks cool - but it was actually a really bad use of 1M valor. Oh well.
Now, maybe if you are looking to raid players who have already maxed out 3,000 units with Growlers I can see how having access to the top units would make a difference. But it sure wouldn't make much difference, since if you had 3,000 Growlers, each dragon plane is worth about 20 extra Growlers - or just 0.7%
Not the "huge difference" you describe in your original post.