I get what you're saying, but any game needs a "casual" playerbase to thrive. New players coming to the game and not being turned away or verbally abused by the existing community (which is actually fairly common, sadly) is IMHO required for a thriving community. Look at StarCraft, for an RTS example. It's a complex (from some perspectives, at any rate) and very demanding game, but it's still played a ton by bad/casual and good players alike.
Aside from Blizzard's cache as a developer, the community itself actively fosters and teaches new and casual players, welcoming them instead of deriding them or berating them for having time commitments.
You can't have it both ways: casuals are going to be, and IMHO have to be a part of this game if the community is going to grow and thrive. Decrying people for (or accusing them of) being "casual" as though the casual gamer is somehow unworthy of playing or having an opinion about COH2 is IMHO narrow minded and counter productive towards the goal of fostering a larger community for this game.
I know the casuals are a major part of the player base, but there are different kind of casuals. There are the kind of casuals that play against AI or on the campaign, these are the people that I don't care about because they add nothing and the game should not be geared towards them. The other kind of casual are people who play custom lobbies and have groups of friends, and get better as time goes by until they get an interest in getting better for the sake of getting better. That's the life blood of an RTS game, RTS games are designed to have incentive for people to get better and better, and that's what I meant by geared to higher levels. Even MOBA games which work very well with real casuals, still incentivise people to get better at the game and get involved.
Right now CoH2 doesn't have any of this. They don't have the basic building blocks - that is, chat lobbies, custom lobbies, and observer mode. These are the building blocks of population and community. Most of the people on coh2.org are CoH1 or DoW2 vets so they're already integrated into the Relic RTS community. I've seen very few 100% new players.
The leaderboards, the tournaments, all of that doesn't matter if they have no foundation. And right now it has no foundation. The twitch integration was a great tool and idea by Relic, but it's not a fitting substitute at all.