There are changes to battle rewards planned to make poor attacks less of a disadvantage. Metal gain will not depend on the battle outcome and losing an attack but destroying the CC will give a little bit of IP. The downside of some new players attacking will be limited to loss of initiative and possibly a loss of dropships if they are idle on a planet. This should not matter much in practice because I have observed that battles start fast enough to absorb all the players who wish to play at that time.
I do not want a small handful of players to have control over where and when everyone attacks. Individual players should be able to take part and have some feeling of control over what they do. It is boring to play the same map repeatably because the leaders decreed that everyone should attack a certain planet. It is much more interesting and investing to select a planet from the galaxy map, attack it and capture it. It is up to the mechanics to make misguided contributions not hurt the faction too much.
The default planets picked for attack targeting are likely to be the ones which are attacked the most. I do not know how these planets are selected but dropship presence increases their priority so this is one possible way to direct battles. Perhaps knights could be given a way to directly set the 3 default planets but I doubt that will in the initial implementation because it would require extra UI work.
Perhaps part of PW is in effectively communicating strategies to the rest of your faction. Remember that the level limit is 10 so the players will have some experience. This also makes it difficult to make malicious smurfs to mess with a faction. This PW is also opt-in and is based on small teamgames so I expect less people and a greater ability to coordinate. It is not designed to replace the large teamgame so people who are completely clueless about PW should be less of an issue.
The 1v1 games are being removed for the issues stated.