There does seem to be an odd disconnect between Chaledon's very low target numbers, which suggests a low pop, and their extremely high effort production which suggests the opposite. Down south, Chaledon is often capable of pushing two to three fronts simultaneously faster than Mercantile can push one.
I guess it might be possible that they have some dedicated group of tryhards that are exploiting the bajeezus out of infiltration speedruns in a passworded faction-only lobby. That method can allegedly crank out about 20k effort every 5 minutes or so with 16 people, and only one of them has to be particularly good (the squid pilot). The squid crew only needs to be decent, and everyone else is just there for the free war effort.
Battles may end up coming down to which side can exploit that method the most ruthlessly, though that situation seems rather... anti-fun.
Back in Open Alpha all the way in August, when Infiltration also didn't exist, we had Retrieve (Old name for Intercept) for this. With the right ships and a decent crew, you could cheese the gamemode in 2 minutes flat or less. I believe it was discovered mostly by Baronies and it helped us capture the most amount of territories by the end of the week - though we also lost just as much because our location forces us to fight multiple fronts.
The problem with alliance is that the gameplay itself and the world map metagame promote completely different ways of playing the game. The game side is slower, it wants you to mess about, take your time and take it all in for maximum enjoyment - which I can understand, you want to have the players actually enjoy the game before anything else.
However, when you have what is essentially a resource race between two groups of players, it becomes all about efficiency. Whoever can crank out the most war effort in the shortest amount of time wins. This incentive was what led to the exploitation of Retrieve gamemode in the first place, - before the convoys gained superhuman tankiness and more numbers. The difficulty multipliers just weren't enough to keep up, and the more difficulty you added the slower your win was anyway, so it didn't actually help you. That fact doesn't help you now either.
My proposal for this issue would be to 1) Significantly raise the war effort multiplier for Hell, and maybe even Veteran difficulty. and 2) Since the end game screen can track time passed, add a multiplier that raises war effort the more time is spent within a game.
Ie: The guy who "rushes" infiltration in 3 minutes gets far, far less war effort than the guy who spent 15 minutes trying to beat Search & Destroy on the same difficulty. But if the Infiltration guy somehow takes 15 minutes to complete his match on the same difficulty, then he gets just as much as the Search & Destroy guy, because they took the same amount of time and hence should get the same amount of war effort. Sure, you can potentially stall out Search & Destroy for atleast 30 minutes with a good stack who abuses the objective system to reset timer to get a crap ton of war effort, but in the end you are making just as much war effort as the guy who spent that 30 minutes playing 3 10-minute Defense rounds. No difference. Less incentive to cheese. More incentive to just play however you want. The only thing that messes up this order will be difficulty multipliers, but those are completely justified, and time-based war effort multiplier will still apply to them.
