I have about 1500 hours in ps2. Loved it. Enjoyed it immensely. I was by far one of the higher skilled players on it.

The game just isn't for everyone. The steep learning curve is unforgiving to inexperienced gamers/fps players. By the nature of it's difficulty and lack of skill segregation it will never have the popularity of other mainstream games. The overwhelming majority of people don't play FPS games even 10% as much as I (or probably you) do.

The only way to fix this is to compress the game's skill curve and remove some of the more frustrating powerful tools. The problem is, that defies the nature of the game and strips away part of its character.

The unfortunate reality is they torpedoed the game with the game with the horrific release performance (frames per second type performance) and the game will never stop alienating new players until they add something to the game that allows inexperienced players and lone wolves to do things other than being repeatedly wrecked. It's an unfortunate catch 22.