Okay! Let me see if I've got your questions right...

First question: Yep! For right now, everyone needs to wait until higher ranks of personal upgrade are available, regardless of the reason. Since the game is so new and people are still getting used to how the upgrade process works to begin with, there are some limitations right now. Once a few rounds of upgrades go by and people are getting the hang of them, the superhuman stuff will start to become available.

Second question: the only abilities that are weakened are whatever you decided to weaken or put limiters on when you apped them. The info about it is on a the app page here. Though, if you decide to change it in any way sometime after you were accepted, you are free to do that too. Really, the only rule about is for players to come up with whatever sort of limitation they're comfortable with that would keep their character from wrecking the fleet. It can even be a conditional sort of thing, if you don't want to cap them too much.

Let me know if this fills you in on what you wanted to know! :'D