I would like to offer my opinion on this topic if that's okay. The way I see it, there are two different types of reality equalization being tackled here - the type where things like Sword Art Online and The Matrix are made of data or dreams but have a separate tier for their appearances in-universe, and the type with things like the SCP Foundation that employ literal metafiction as part of their fantasy cosmology. I would argue that the policy for instances with and without qualitative superiority should be different and that the RE policy needs a serious overhaul like we're
currently doing with the RFT page.
- For the former with dreams and data, I could see it working because data and dreams are objectively fairly normal physical matter regardless of what it's simulated as inside digital worlds; also, there's already some precedent for it in stuff like SCP, like with CORE.exe, which is High 1-A in the digital world but Tier 9 in the physical world (its data is Tier 10 but it's ranked as Tier 9 because it can possess devices that are that powerful). As such, a tier like 10-C (Made of data/dreams), <INSERT TIER> in the digital/mental world (<FEAT JUSTIFICATION>) for them is likely well-justified.
- For the latter with cases of genuine RFT, I'm still fresh off a Q&A thread about this topic where someone brought up some r/CharacterRant posts to argue that we should tier cases of proven RFT by always treating the top layer as the baseline and tiering everything below that as Tier 11 because most stuff is real in-universe despite being fictional while verses with RFT are fiction within fiction. I and a few other people, including some staff, quickly shot down that idea because it amounted to a gross misunderstanding of how RFT is supposed to work, given how this stance seemed to be a misinterpretation of the rule that RFT can't make you interact with the real world to say that it must instead make you inferior to verses that don't have it. Not to mention, it would flood the wiki with unreliable profiles because most authors consider incorporating transcendent layers to be an upwards climb, not something that pushes their power levels down (If proven, the second type of metafiction would actually cause the characters to be Tier 11, an example being the narratives in the SCP Foundation cosmology that are explicitly portrayed as inferior to the main narrative). I would argue that reality equalization as a policy shouldn't even be related to this type of genuine RFT, as to say "reality equalization" implies that the obvious baseline realities in types of verses like SCP are inherently unequal to verses that don't use RFT and we have to use a convention to make them equal, which provides ammunition to ranters who hate on our Tiering System. When I tried to argue for a more comprehensive note to guard against this misconception, DontTalkDT told me the reality equalization page covered it, and though I didn't agree, I didn't push the issue at the time because Ant agreed with him and I had already gotten the Q&A thread to say that VS Battles Wiki doesn't recognize r/CharacterRant's butchering of our RFT policies.
TL;DR: I believe Reality Equalization should be deleted and split into two different policies, the first being something like "Existence Equalization" that would cover dreams, data, and the like receiving different tiers for their data and their "internal" portrayals, and the second could be incorporated into the RFT page as a more comprehensive policy to determine which layer in a metafictional reality-fiction hierarchy we treat as the baseline.
