Counting Cinder and Ozpin is easy, since we know they're powerful just by the roles they play. I like RWBY, but it's extremely typical in it's battle anime structure, so obviously the main villain and the mentor are going to be top tier, not because there's any in story demonstration seen thus far, but because that's the tropey way to go.
We don't really have a place to put Cardin and his team, but we should know they're not in the same tier as Jaune since they kick his ass. They could be B or C tier, since it seems those bears weren't that much of a threat, but then again, maybe they were and Jaune was just using his super secret special super awesome super powers he has dormant. Likewise, Torchwick could be anything from D-tier who happens to have good connections, to A tier who is just really holding back. I really doubt he's at Cinders level, if only for how she intimidates him.
The normal gang.....well, they're clearly good and they're the main characters, so they'll grow into S and SS tier most likely. But right now, they could be anywhere from B to S tier. We don't have a point of reference for the whole school.
The team takes hits like that all the time, none of the others were a cause for concern. In that fight alone, Blake and Yang got in the blast area of one of it's cannons and Weiss was hit dead on by what seems to be a rail gun. I'd assume atleast the latter would be a stronger hit than a mech punch, but no one seemed concerned about her (But then again, it is Weiss, so who would be).
It just seems that one moment they aren't even concerned with taking ridiculous hit or putting out insane damage, but when they need to move some plot element, the writers play it dramatically even when they shouldn't. Blake's comment was really just used as an excuse so Ruby could explain Yang's ability to the audience (doubly so since after a semester of training together, the whole team should have a grasp on each other's basic abilities by now). This is similar to how Penny's ability to stop the truck ought to have been a "Oh, you're a super badass too? Cool" instead of this dramatic moment of disbelief, just so they have an excuse to reveal Penny's poorly kept secret of being a robot, even though Ruby and everyone around her have accomplished similar feats of strength without effort.
Not....necessarily. Your logic is that if there is a better team than RWBY, they must be special so they'd be named, is circular. It presumes that RWBY is already a special team. My point is, what if they are completely average students that simply take more of an initiative than others? Beacon Academy tasks so far have been to kill Grimm Creatures that were presumably measured to be something the new students could tackle. Other than that, most of their schoolwork has been regular school work. And this White Fang/Torchwick hunt that RWBY has been on lately is not school commissioned. They do it on their own. For all we know, the monsters that CRDL and CVFY took on were just as bad as the Nevermore and Scorpion, or even worse, but CRDL is just made up of douchebags while CVFY is....idk, we haven't met them yet. So what if they are precisely in the 50th percentile of the school? You wouldn't expect them to name the dozens of teams they are lower than for no reason except to show the audience how much they suck.
My money is on RWBY being one of the better teams as well, but it's less than anything the show showed me, and more because that's how the tropes go. The main characters in battle anime are kick ass, almost always. Obviously, I don't mind RWBY being badass, but better writing means you have to justify it and demonstrate it. And if the format is different than that of usual TV productions, that's not an excuse, it's just something that has to be accounted for.
But I think we're getting deeper than I like into this discussion. One thing we all agree on is that these things, in all likelihood, will become clearer in time. The next episode is tomorrow, so lets just wait until the season is over before assessing it wholly.
Weapons are another story..
