As Jayarr stated, the "impression" of standardization being removed applied to whitelist caps, uniqueness, and how far Development is willing to play into the communities hands with their creative ideas, since we now have the man power to consistently deliver unique things to make each battalion appealing.
It was stated at the TS Meeting and even a few other times during things like the Q&As/passing conversation, that for the sake of developers times, keeping things fair, and to prevent one battalion being way too population dense compared to others, that sub-units were capped at 2 per battalion. Some battalions struggle to keep their main battalion alive, adding a 3rd squad to each battalion just adds more competition for that struggling battalion, plus the issues of battalions becoming too alike, if each battalion has a specialized squad, conflicts of interest for each squad will start to happen more often resulting in priority issues, and overall just making it less fun to be lower on that priority scale, which is why we encourage people to make their current sub-units/battalions special, instead of creating another one.
TL;DR
Yes. The norm is no longer. but some things need to be capped for the betterment of server/battalion health.