Yeah actually, I think having Mortar and Cluster Bomb both at 3 star power in Team17
is my second preference, personally. I recognise that the scheme is in concept and practice different enough from league variants of Intermediate that it should be able to sustain those weapons at their standard values, even if you're then still stuck with the weird disparity between getting a single Mortar and three Cluster Bombs from a crate.
So, I'd be pretty happy about doing it this way myself (as you may be able to guess from previous discussions, I am a bit of a standardisation nutter), but I know there have been more than a few players over the years who just straight up hated these cluster weapons being able to do 80+ damage, to target worms who often didn't get the chance to try and hide from it, or simply couldn't justify it over doing something else. Similarly to how introducing Kamikaze to the Team17 scheme would mess with players' late game expectations, powerful Cluster Bombs (Mortars to a lesser extent, I know) feel like they would mess with their notion of what is and isn't a good hide throughout the game, especially since for whatever reason, both T17 and Elite schemes have historically had Cluster Bomb nerfed all the way down to 1 star power. Having them at 2 stars is then a) already a buff compared to what the majority of players are used to and b) actually just quite strong in real terms, not much worse than 3 star power would be.
But yeah anyway, for this one tournament where Senator specifically wants to be testing some of the proposed changes out, I don't think it matters either way. He'll know best what he is and isn't interested in trying out, and we can continue the discussion about the scheme in general elsewhere, as we have been.