I think ideally RNG would be split three ways:
- regular RNG like accuracy. Same as now. This is what makes the series truly stand out;
- irregular RNG like main gun critical or plane crashes. These should be available in automatch, but they should be less impactful. For example MGC could give an accuracy penalty rather than completely destroying the gun, or plane crashes could be hardcapped to never kill entire squads;
- Esports mode that removes all irregular RNG for tournaments.
If that were true, we would see a decline in player numbers over the past years as the game has become more competitively focused. However, the opposite has happened; the playerbase has been growing. The player numbers themselves don't tell us anything without deeper research.
While I don't want to shit on your work as well as on-going community efforts to support and try to improve the game I think you're a bit obviously biased towards your own work here and that's normal as anyone else and their "creation" so to speak.
However in reality it seems like you're just catering to the small percentage of players on here and that's what's keeping you because Relic cannot be simply bothered to pour in more resources since CoH2 isn't the money maker it once was a few years ago, however you're still somehow managing to roll in the dough so why not.
I think it's a rather different cause.
People can rally behind the competitive scene while also enjoying plenty of other things which are aimed towards the more casual players, even though the base PvP game is not changed with them in mind.
Compare the modding capabilities and custom games modes from WC3/SC2/AoE2. Even if Blizzard basically got swallowed by Activision, they basically got a free more years of support for SC2 by having a extremely popular coop mode. They made the base game free (IIRC), same with the arcade mode, which is way simpler to install, boot and play.
Similar cases with WC3/AOE2.
I don't know how many casual people follow the competitive scene exactly and I'm guessing that the main menu news feed is the main reason why some people are even updated or care about it in the first place but yeah like I said it's like football/soccer where people just sit in front of a screen and yell or in our case just shittalk on twitch and make memes which is somehow fun for them.
However just a note about AoE2, it's a game from 1999, so last century basically, and if it's still has a strong and loyal following and fanbase which is twice as large as CoH2's, a game from 2013 with albeit small updates for over 20 years now I think it's safe to say that they're formula is working and successful, as I would argue is CoH's which even after 14 years of being a somewhat niche RTS game still has a pretty good following of around 2000 people daily as you can see here:
https://steamdb.info/app/228200/ which is not even something some new games out there can brag about, having less than 500 like Foxhole for example.