so a Lance of 3Rs could give a singular Mad Cat IV a run for its money if the Savage Wolf mechwarrior is the wrong variant
This is the part I think the disconnect is. Just because you have 14 Marauder 3Rs for the price of 1 MadCatIV, does not mean you get to put 14 Marauder 3Rs up against the MadCatIV. If you always got to deploy every cbill in every engagement, then OK, but that isnt the argument nor the game. Even in campaign operations/chaos campaigns, the place cbills matter, you build a unit and field lances at a time (or whatever force size your opponents agree on ahead of time). Cbills ramp up quickly on XL and XXL, but when you have the money they offer something you cant get without them.
In the lore, this is the case with transport limit, so its not just a game issue. A scout jumpship is 389 million, a leopard is 168 or a union is 215, and the entire package is not combat useful at all. So the smallest overhead investment for transport is 139 million per bay, while a reasonable one with a union is 50 million per battlemech. So when you have already put 50 million to get that transport bay to its target, you dont want 12 Marauder 3Rs to pop out if you can afford better. As your transport fleet burgeons along with the mass quantity of forces fighting, the value of elite units goes down. If you have a potempkin loaded with overlords... well yeah at that far end of the spectrum the forces involved are so great that the elite nature of a madcatIV is lost in the weeds. But, like in HBS battletech, if you have a leopard to deploy/work with, you want the 4 nastiest, most high tech elite monsters that you can afford, with the pilots to match.
I brought up the point about 1 F35 versus 50 F5s, because if 1 F35 had to fight 50 F5s at the same time, there isnt enough missiles or fuel to do it. But, like the MadCatIV, the f35 doesnt have to make its 'money' back in one single fight. It can win fights one at a time, and come back again and again. And yes, like the f35, there is some luck involved with a single unit and no backups... both may suffer some crazy circumstance that results in a unit being lost, but 6 f35s or 6 MadCatIVs wont all suffer malfunction simultaneously.
It is also contingent on pilot skills too. You dont put a top gun graduate in an F5(urbanmech) on the front lines, and you dont put a cadet logging flight hours to qualify for their license in an f35(MadcatIV) on the front lines. A top gun graduate (gunslinger) is worth 90 million on a mech, easy peazy no question about it.
Like, I mention solaris in an earlier post. I wouldnt bet on the Marauder 3R if it was versus the MadCatIV, and the fact that the Marauder is cheaper wont help it win that fight. By the time a Marauder did get a win, your stable would be barren with no fans to celebrate your lucky upset over the MadCatIV, as you fed that MadCat countless mechs before you got lucky.