The divisional ranking system is based on teams playing each other, oftentimes at various levels. While this is an arbitrary ranking system based on, I assume, your personal opinion. I'm rather sure Kazakhstan has never played Estonia at any level, at least over the last 15 years. And likely won't play for at least another 10, so why would they be in the same group? I assume you "punished" Kazakhs for being riddled with imports but their U18s and U20s, with 0 imports, would destroy any number of countries easily. Why not go after Italy then whose U20s lose to Ukraine on a regular basis and get smoked by Poland 15-3?
Why does Romania not belong to any group, they have just won the division against Estonia and Poland? While Ukraine is, while they have to fight relegation at men's level every year, they even lost to the Netherlands last year? If it's based on what their U20 teams are, again, Kazakhs have played in the elite 2 years in a row.
More importantly, this isn't how it works organically. The focus of this ranking seems to be equally-sized groups rather than reality. Slovenia, GB, Kazakhstan and Hungary could all challenge "mid-majors", hell, Kazakhstan is beating them at every level on a regular basis so the line you draw between mid-majors and mid-minors is unrealistic, it's just not there. While, at the same time, to Lithuania or Estonia, most countries within our own tier are out of reach. How and at what level could we challenge Kazakhs or Hungary?
The realistic ranking should be decided by how many pro players (and of what level) does the country develop because ultimately that's what makes up the NT or at least the core of it, at lower levels. We could then quite clearly see there are teams that have semi-pro NTs (Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, the Netherlands (although they are about to fall of the cliff altogether), Korea is getting there) and they really don't have the capacity to challenge countries above them, other than some single-game miracle (like how Romania got promoted last year). Then there are countries that do produce low-level pros their NTs are made off - Poland, Hungary, GB, Japan, Italy.. and there is really no clear cut-off line here. You could add Slovenia, Kazakhstan.. even Belarus, Norway and France to this group because there is a gradual climb in quality but until the team starts producing NHL-level talent (or at least close to it) somewhat consistently there is no hard line separating these countries. Because we could continue and say the gap between France and Austria isn't actually all that great either, and then Austria and Latvia, etc. Minor details come into play. In the end, we do see the gap between Poland and France as kinda huge at the men's level but the French U20 team just finished 2nd in the D1B, exact same place Poland finished 4 years in a row before.
So what's mid-majors and mid-minors everyone can decide for himself because realistically such groups hardly exist. Or if they do, to me, majors should be countries that have their players drafted to the NHL regularly, mid-majors should be ones that have fully professional national teams and mid-minors should be countries with semi-pro national teams. That's easily quantifiable and devoid of bias.
Regarding Poland, I think Wronka's example illustrates their main problem: they have a cushy local league and very few of their local guys push for being better. At the junior level they are pretty competitive but all those high-end (at the time) prospects of theirs - Wronka, Guzik, Starzynski, Kapica, Fraszko, even Pas and Jeziorski, they are pretty uninspiring players at the men's level. I definitely believe if some (more) of them packed their bag and went to play abroad they would have achieved more. It's not necessarily easy, Chmielewski had to spend 3 years in Trinec until he even got to the first team but in the end it was well worth it.
Actually, it probably happened in U20s and U18s too, I didn't account for divisions being the way they were before 2011 split.
