That is insane. Sorry but that's an unbelievably penalising addition to the game designed purely to make you spend cash by increasing the grind massively.
I spent a fair amount in Me3 multiplayer (more than the game on release day!), but I'm not spending money just to get skill points on characters.
Yeah its going to be tough. There are 13 ultra rare weapons and 5 ultra rare characters. That is 180 ultra rare cards that can be had in premium packs that guarantee an ultra rare.
So you will need 180 packs for 18,000,000 credits. That would take, I think, 360 gold games to buy (assuming you clear them all). Lets call it 450 gold games.
Then the DLC will come out with new characters and new weapons.
In ME3 there were 21 ultra rare weapons. So, 210 upgrades were required. To do that you needed, I think, about 210 platinum games. Platinum didn't exist for a while. So you probably needed about 420 gold games (assuming you cleared them all). Probably only the 1% maxed out ultra rares in that game.
When I think about it they have really only added 5 characters to the system. But it does seem weird to lock skill points behind spec cards.