Interesting theory etc.
Well it is in the game files allong woth "commander ability booster packs", containg containg abilites of different rarity.
So they have certainly taken it further than a concept stage. And booth the ingame store and warspoils could be considered a steps towards that.
They have a relatively ambitious roadmap for such an old game and they wouldn't do that unless they had some plans to lift reveue from that more that the "short term" Brits.
As a pure speculation from my part, I would not be surprised if they take it down some variant of a free to play model to attract new players to a game that was realeased long ago. (It's not like they previously shown interest in that route to get a coh game to a wider audience...)