Why in the world is the ladder situation a grim one? There are ladders. Quite frankly, I would rather have the elite competitive community here run them than Relic.
Then you're a fool.
You'd rather an unprofessional third party run something that's integral to the game's development rather than a professional development team that is paid to do these things?
The Ladder situation is grim because Relic was forced to go to an unprofessional third party to provide a key service. That is massive no-no for developer credibility.
The Ladders are for coh2.org and nobody else. Unless you go to coh2.org, you know nothing about them. If you're banned from coh2.org, you are not going to be able to use them. If you do not like coh2.org, you are forced to come here to use the Ladder.
That is a really shitty situation to put your playerbase in. Many people don't like this website. Quite a few people that play coh2 are IP Banned from this website. So what you now have is an unprofessional third party in charge of a key feature for a game, hosted outside the game, with the ability to ban people from using this key feature, totally outside Relic's authority.
Also, the majority of people are not even aware it exists.
When you are forced to do what Relic has done, that's pretty unprofessional. Relic has no interface for a Ladder. They don't have a button in game for a ladder that redirects you to coh2.org's limited one(Limited in the time I had to wait to see a ladder, that is. In its own right the Ladder is awesome for coh2.org). They don't have a ladder in their game.
You're really dumb if you think a player community of any sort is more qualified to run game features than a developer.
If you cannot see the issues that are inherent with what I've just stated, then think a bit more. If you still can't think again. If you still can't, then, well, there's no point talking to somebody who doesn't the capacity to break down a problem into smaller components, because it'd be like talking to a three year old.