Standardizing abilities and techniques is a difficult thing to do, depending on to what extent you are wanting to do it. You'll have to clarify to what extent you mean.

It is hard to enforce tiers which is why there was a stray away from it solely because of the wide variety of characters and variety of powers. Everyone has the ability to accept or decline the match, so there shouldn't be much mystery going into the match and most people should have already thought through some of the interactions their abilities would have with another. A judge would come in many cases when there is a disagreement between the two parties on how said abilities would actually interact.

I'm generally not a huge fan of intricate tier systems because even if you continue to divide the characters up, there will still be issues between upper and lower end of a tier. I feel it is just easier to logically look at how two characters might match up when arranging a battle and accept/decline/edit bios accordingly.

As for preparation, I think most people are pretty consistent with preforming preparation unless there are specific battles where it is agreed it isn't necessarily needed because of some reasons, such as other constraints aside from preparation. Trying to create a standardized system will generally get us into the same mess as an intricate tier system. Like before, we get to see what abilities our opponent has and we should generally have a sense of any aspects of a technique or ability that wouldn't require preparation. This can easily be enforced or clarified either before or during the match by the parties involved or judges.

In a very simplified form, I view magic as a product of time and focus (as in specialization), but there are obviously other factors.