They absolutely do this on purpose, and it isn’t going to change.
If it were that much easier to get 1/1/1 for a new character, you’d be less likely to push harder on top placement in PVE and any placement in PVP, which means you aren’t spending HP on health packs to play competitively, nor on tokens/covers to try and pull those missing power covers.
They don’t want it to be that easy, because they want to entice you to buy your way out of the problem, because that’s how they make money.
Further, the artificial rarity of those covers (especially the first one, which is usually the hardest to acquire), increases the value of the reward for the player. If you come out of the release cycle with a 0/0/3, someone who worked hard for the extra covers and has a 1/1/3 will have all the powers, and a more usable character, and that’s part of their reward for working so hard during the release. If the covers were more even, and you had a 1/1/1, and the person who worked hard for top placement had a 1/2/2, it wouldn’t feel like as much of an advantage (and, strictly speaking for the release PVP, it wouldn’t be). It’s a tiny thing, and it won’t matter a month out when you’ve both got a handful of covers for the character, but it matters a lot during that tiny release window (case in point, if it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t be commenting about the 0/0/3 character).
Though, as a side note, way WAY back in the day I remember a node in the PVP Season (IN the season, not Shield Simulator or the regular events, but in the season where you go to check season rewards) that had a Join Forces node that let you try out a new character (I want to say last one I played like that was Silver Surfer, but that was before I started playing competitively enough to care to keep track of such things). Getting to try out a new character was kinda fun. Unfortunately that experience is reduced to the Join Forces node in the release following the event (we’ll get to dabble with Mockingbird a little in Meet Rocket & Groot). You walk a fine line with that, some people will play a new character, think they’re fun, and be more inclined to pay for them, but others might play the new character and be more inclined to skip them.
I’d love the season node to come back to let us play with new 4s/5s, but it’s a double-edged sword that they may have decided isn’t worth using, you know?