Just stop pretending gaming is a sport and you have to earn things
Enjoy a great game. I loved Halo 2's ranking system, but it was so hard to get above 30. Then you go to Halo 3 which it is super easy to get 40+ in several different playlists, I was a level 29 in Halo 2 and was a 45 on two accounts in Halo 3. My problem with basing your whole game around a campaign then a multiplayer with a ranking system is that the game get's stale over time. Halo 2, this wasn't so much the case because you still had tons of glitches to play with. However, in Halo 3, the forge system was mostly complicated, the ranking system was too easy, and there wasn't enough to do inside the game to keep it interesting. I actually consider Halo 3 a step back, not a step forward. Not that Halo 3 wasn't fun and didn't have it's moments, but Halo 2 held my attention for much longer and technically it had less to do online.
Halo 4 isn't just basing themselves off of a ranking system to bring players in and keep them around. 343 is working on making the game fun to play on multiple levels, you have a great campaign, spartan ops is everything bungie wished ODST was, a great multiplayer, and a full scale zombie mode.
Not to mention, Spartan ops is a full scale campaign telling a side story on top of the main campaign.
The ranking system won't matter at all, because all of those "hardcore" gamers went to CoD, which is basically a joke in terms of ranking systems. <-That renders your argument invalid