[Omnirizon]

In practice, you will almost never get the initial expansion during an actual MP game that you get in build testing. Other players also expand fast, and will attack an overexpanded player who pushes into what they consider their 'implicit territory' (the provinces surrounding their cap, and probably many of those within two steps of cap too). For these reasons (and the latter one especially) metrics like initial expansion are over-hyped.

Initial expansion capacity possesses some minimum requirement to be competitive, but with some threshold beyond which it is pointless. For most MP games (which have about 12 provinces per player) most nations will not get 15 initial provinces. Most will get whatever the mean number of provinces per player is, regardless of how well they do in testing (unless they do just really really bad).