You can unlock L2 hardware and movement with T1 points, armor being L1 with T1 points because you start with light chassis instead of L1 armor.
Also, playing the game T1 to get everything was never viable, if you look at RP costs. You get stuffforgetnothing RP in tier 1 battles. But hey, however you manage to get your killchains is up to you, whether it be stomping new people or getting good.
I do admit the charge time on the first rail is pretty ridiculous though. It seems as if they're nerfing the stuff out of having just one gun on your robot, probably because they want to stop people taking higher tier guns into lower tier games. Pretty stupid way of going about it though. My single-smg robot isn't even viable anymore now that they made semi-auto fire less accurate and now that they reduced the rate of fire significantly for only having 1 or 2.
Edit: Okay I see what they did wrong with rails. I thought they'd just recharge at a normal rate so long as you didn't shoot all of them. But they don't even charge unless you shoot all of them.
The game pretty much wants you to always load up your robot with as many guns as possible.