Agree with a couple of your points, but on your point about them listening to the community, in my experience 3arch already does that in quite a large way. A lot of their design decisions have been guided my community feedback. The reason that it doesn't always seem like it is because of vocal minorities who whine one way or the other.
For example, on the quickscoping issue, in BO 1 when the game first released, snipers had pretty severe built in ADS scope sway because they had heard a lot of feedback saying that sniping, and in particular quickscoping, needs to be way nerfed. The smaller but very vocal quickscoping community kept complaining because they were used to quickscoping being easy. Gradually 3arch, adjusted/improved snipers in that game and then the people who hate quickscopers started complaining. Eventually the number of complainers was close to equal on both sides and they figured snipers were about right.
Vahn said himself (I read it in a tweet but I'm paraphrasing) that it's not about making everyone happy and giving them what they want, but rather about make everyone a little unhappy (a.k.a. compromise). This also seems to be there approach to knives in BO 2. They know that a pretty solid majority of people think knifing is overpowered at least in some capacity. So they said they're going to change it for BO 2. But, no matter what they do there will ALWAYS be a ton of complainers coming on these forums because things aren't exactly the way they want them. But just because 3arch is smart enough not to make rash design changes off of the complaints of the minority doesn't mean that they don't listen to the community.
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