After all this, I personally think the leaderboards should have simply been reset with new features and all before even consulting the public. Yes, people would be upset. Yes, people may stop playing. The thing is, the positive factors and weight of the players who want a reset compared to those who don't outweigh everyone voting no...
Remember when regional leaderboards were released? Gameplay wouldn't be much different than when this happened. Each game will have it's few people playing ultra competitively. I estimate that within a month or two the new leaderboards will stabilize and gameplay will slowly return to the norm, with which we'll be left shiny, new statistic tracking instead something basic and outdated. I'm curious to see what these new leaderboards would look like and how detailed they would be. Statistics can become something super detailed containing who exactly you killed in each individual game or how many times you've killed a certain player. It'd be more fun than anything.