Great points! Examples of play are key to getting folks who haven't gotten much FitD to the table to really grok the way the interlocking systems work together in play to ground the ongoing fiction. As it stands, we were trying to get the ashcan, the in-development and earliest iterable playtest, into folks hands. There's still a lot of work to be done before we can call anything finished or really be happy with the draft as a whole.
As for Tier, it's a helpful abstraction but it's hard to nail down. Tier 2's magnitude, scale, and quality is a discussion that might occur in the fiction, but as a quick wag of what I'd consider a Tier 2 obstacle? That'd be a checkpoint patrolled by 8 guards in bodyarmor with automatic weapons. They've got effective gear, communications equipment, there are more of them than a standard Cell, and they've got positional superiority. That's a /tough/ challenge to a cell starting out, overwhelming maybe. But with the tools available to a Cell--teamwork, flashbacks, using stress, load items, etc--they can bypass or overcome a Tier 2 challenge even as a Tier 0. It's a nasty setback, but doable.
Tier's abstract, and it's something that we'll definitely be exploring in greater detail as the ashcan develops.