I think that what Torch pointed out makes sense, it was weird that Base Natsu could defeat Neinhart like that, however speculation is based on perspective, Base Natsu did beat Neinhart, and we can't really write it off as anything else, the power of friendship argument is still dumb in my opinion, in plenty of series, Heroes manage to defeat opponents after friendship speeches and they all get stronger due to it, Natsu has done this all the time, if we couldn't scale Natsu because he won by giving a speech about Friendship, then he wouldn't scale to a lot of things, which I feel is wrong, you're supposed to measure a characters tier based on their max power, and max Base Natsu can defeat Neinhart who is stronger than Brandish, I think the real issue is Hiro Mashima hyping the Spriggans, even if Natsu was afraid of Brandish, we know that with FDKM, he could have One-Shot her anyways, so even without his base form, he would've been able to finess her, meaning that him being afraid of her at all, makes 0 sense to begin with, I think the most logical reason is that the spriggans have differing Powers, all of them are stated to be at least as strong as Brandish, but feat-wise, Jacob is above Brandish and Neinhart, I think it's really just based on perspective of what you believe, but since we're supposed to rate the characters at max power, Base Natsu is Spriggan level, it's the same reason we scale X784 Natsu to Zancrow, at the beginning of the series, Natsu isn't as strong as Zancrow, but we scale X784 Natsu to his max power in X784, so we should do the same with X792 Base Natsu