I'll give you the perspective from someone just coming back after a year.
When I stopped pvping, probably closer to 18 months ago, there were pvp 10's, but not as many. The ones who were pvp 10 (for the most part) were going to be good no matter what, as they were excellent players. I could play my demo in minis and routinely go 2-1, 3-1 ratio. Nothing special. And make no mistake, I never considered myself great.
Now that I am back, I was running around on my necro, which has decent AA's and pvp 4 store gear and 2 pieces of pvp 4 mini armor. I noticed that I got a lot of kills when my team did pretty good, but I didn't feel like I was doing a ton to sway the tide of a mini. Then I remembered the goofy way funcom does it's kills and realized I was stealing kills and not really helping the team.
So I switched to my demo and did a few minis. Good gear, almost pvp 9, good AA's, Good weapons. First couple of minis, I was really rusty and bad... hitting wrong binds. Then I started nailing everything and felt really good about the way I was playing. I would look at the score and be 5-3 instead of the 15-3 that I used to be. I thought it was weird... so I looked around and 8 of the 12 people in the mini were pvp 9 or 10. I hadn't noticed, because tbh, they were pretty bad players. I was used to a pvp 10 being a threat, so it didn't register.
Moral of the story, pvp gear has shifted the balance of the game significantly into the soldiers favor. I believe when I left the game, someone asked this same question and Demo was number 1 in both duels and group. Now it feels as though we are average at best.
I will say that there is no one class that I see and run from, except maybe a good sin (stupid immunity LOL). I feel as though everyone else, I have a fighting chance at.