It’s not just one feedback loop, it’s three totally disjoint ones. It seems that except for expeditions, you’ll only ever get investigations for the same tier of monster that you’re tracking. So there’s not even a natural bootstrap where you work through the lower tiers of monsters to get to the elders. You can do the lower tier tempered investigations, sure. But they’ll get you just crap decorations and won’t help advance the game.
And on the other hand, me and my friend did all but one of the tempered elders before we ever found a single middle-tier tempered investigation. There just wasn’t any reliable source for those tracks. (We finally got it bootstrapped through the Vaal+Odogaron optional quest.)
This meant we got a really stupid power curve, pretty much having to beat tempered elders with normal HR gear, and only then finding the monsters that were supposed to be the intermediate stepping stone that unlocked rarity 6/7 armor augments.
I guess. And that means SOS flares for tempered monsters might have been an option that we just totally missed. But the only thing that matters is finding tracks, completing the hunt is totally worthless. That means that we would have needed to spend a good chunk of the quest trying to find tracks, not on fighting the monster. You can either be a good team-mate to the people who sent the SOS but just get the crap material rewards, or be a total dick and actually get the thing you need.
It’s just shit design no matter how I think about it.