Maybe your just blind, or stupid, but on the 30 minutes I spent on illum as a REPUBLIC, I was getting 150 valor per kill, and I wen't up from rank 22 to 24 in those 30 minutes, both of those levels take about 5k valor, its honestly not hard to get a **** ton of valor from illum, and considering Imps are getting twice the amount of kills? Wouldn't be suprised if people had gotten battlemaster in 5 or so hours.
Ontop of all this, we only owned 1 base, the Imps owned the rest, so they were probably getting twice as much valor per kill.