You could try this strat yourself even if just against AI, to familiarise yourself with its weaknesses. If he builds scout cars then he has no fast access to Zis. So even if his micro is good enough to avoid eating a faust then he has little AT. The German scoutcar practically oneshots Russian ones with the autocannon upgrade. If he goes penals and flamers he might not even have antitank grenades on conscripts. And also no machine guns, means that your scoutcar is basically invincible until he gets some armour out.
In windows 8 the coh2 icon flashes while you are searching for a game and will actually become a loading bar if you find a match and it begins loading (while tabbed out). Pro tip. Not sure about win7 tho.
It does this in Win 7 also but its a bit buggy tabbing back, for me at least. Those team players who make the first building after 30 seconds, I dont want to be one of those.
There was no problem getting games in DOW2 with about 1/3 of the population. One nice thing was that you could tab out and then when you got a match you directed straight to that. I know COH2 has similar if you change some steam files but I think relic should make that default. Anyway I think the game will be vibrant until Relic abandon it , which doesnt look soon obviously.
I believe it is possible to gain Elo for losing if the gap between players is high enough and other parameters are set in certain ways. Maybe the equation/algorithm may be knocked out of line a bit with the AT and RT change.
The matchmaking factor is important, if it puts you against high players, it maybe figures that you should also be up there in the ranking so you get lots of Elo gain for winning (and conversely even dont lose Elo for losing). i.e. your matchmaking rating may be much higher than your current Elo level, so these things will happen until you get even points for playing people your level.