Matching by glory will be completely uneven at the start. Yes you'll get matches between all global age alliances vs all iron age alliances. After few rounds, the dust will settle, the most advanced alliances will naturally come at the top. The low level alliances will stay at the bottom. It will eventually give a natural distribution on the leaderboard of global age alliances then industrial age alliances, etc... down to iron age alliances. Some mixtures will exist in between these categories.
Once the glory scale is streched out enough, the global age alliances will only get matched with global age alliances because they'll both have high glory. So there won't be any unfair matches. It's the same as the medal leaderboard, does anyone see IA or EA or GP players there? No, because if they come high enough in medals, someone stronger than them will push them down. The current stalemate situation (no glory) can only make sense if the matchmaking is based on glory.
Finally there is no way to cheat that system like on the medal leaderboard where you voluntarily drop medals to get easy loot. If you are high in glory, what is the point of purposely losing a war to drop glory? The war loot is ridiculous anyway. Glory is what it should be, a reward for alliances who are the best at wars, not the best at cheating the system by including low level accounts, not the best at making fake matches with sister alliances to push their scores up.
Adapting to the current system is adapting to mediocrity. Saying the current leaderboard is fair is like being IA, loving to bully EA players while complaining about being smashed by GA players. If you are on the current leaderboard, it means you get easier matches and you can win. Clearly you will disagree to a free for all leaderboard where the strongest will be on top with no check on player level.
A free to play game is by definition targeted to the top 1%. Statistically, there is about 2% of players who actually pay to play the game. The rest of the people are just here to provide sparring partners to the ones who actually pay. I'm not saying that because I pay to play, I haven't spend a dime on this game. But I understand the economics of the business.
The top 1% have players refer to as whales in the business. People who can drop thousands of dollars per month on a game like this. And these people want something to show for it, a leaderboard. What would be the point for them to pay, upgrade to global age and not see any benefit for it? If you don't cater for the top 1%, you are killing your own business model.
Global age has been released to keep the top 1% busy, same with the university. Does the majority of players actually think they can complete all the university research? Same with walls, they are expensive to keep the top 1% busy.