Reddit reviews The Defense of Hill 781: An Allegory of Modern Mechanized Combat

Your comment made me think a bit about why that might be true.

Real warfare is a highly uncertain business. More than coh2, certainly much more than sc2. Simple example: those tanks you were assigned might show up, or three hours late (front tank threw a track on a narrow bridge?), or not at all (got reassigned on route to a more critical area)... or maybe the tank commander will be so worried about his own tanks that he'll be unwilling to give you the support you need to carry out your attack--but you have to do it anyways.

coh2 doesn't even come close to simulating the chaos of real war (and each patch seems to take away a bit more uncertainty), but it does try to include some elements of it throughout gameplay. Variable weapon damage, surprise squad wipes, squads that stumble around a bit recovering from a shock, etc. They all add to the uncertainty of combat but take away from the ability to predict exactly what is going to happen. This is the flavor that the devs have chosen.

In the more highly-structured world of sc2 you have a much stronger ability to predict the results of an action, so I can see why competitive players would prefer that. They want to know that their happy path is going to keep working for them, so they can keep winning. Anything that takes away certainty is going to make them very annoyed.

The developers clearly want to keep some of that uncertainty in the game, even as they flirt with the competitive community. I bet it is going to be hard to find a good balance.

edit: There's nothing unique to coh2 when it comes to people figuring out how to exploit a map or any feature of the game. That's a phenomenon in absolutely every game that has ever existed. That's because people are competitive--the games are just a way to express it.