I'm personally in favour of doing the process and sending acknowledgement letter earlier; it provides assurance to people that their documents reached Tipp fine. Sure, there's An Post confirmation if delivery is tracked (I assume there's no madman sending docs with unregistered post), but for me 6 month wait until the first letter was a nightmare.
Also, acknowledgement letter does not guarantee that your documents and/or application are fine and correct (eg see this post
post2076325.html#p2076325 where TCC was asked after acknowledgement letter was received), so nothing changed for the timelines.
I see your point, Romblon, as a 2021 applicant who didn't even get eVetting, and would prefer they'd fix their backlog so that they can fully focus on working with scorecard system, for example, but it is what it is. I'm happy that people applying now are better off than we are; no point of making them go through the same hoops of waiting for acknowledgement for ages if there's a way to avoid it.
If you want transparency - go for FOI, see what they did to your documents and post it on the forums (good example here -
ireland/citizenship-application-process ... 73543.html) or ask questions to ISD/MPs. That's the best we as applicants can do,