The high round community is a funny bunch.
Certain rules contradict others, and they seem to be made based to suit situations rather than being consistent throughout.
There are an awful lot of players who don't believe BO2 should have leaderboards for some of the reasons you state.
Most of these players hate the Buried strategy of playing infront of Jugg as they say it's not proper zombies. They say that you need to run to play zombies properly.
I kinda agree with that, however for Buried I've done coop games to round 80 3 times camping that spot, and camping 2p is very different to 3 player.
Me and Boysta coined a phrase, 'running like a man' when Die Rise came out, and it was a little ironic piss take at how some people think, and their ludicrous contradictory arguments.
It's amazing how often I hear players use that now in videos.
The funniest one was someone who decided that the only way to run Die Rise like a man was to only shoot in the middle of the restaurant, not in the corner.
I really dislike most of the high round community for some of the reasons I've mentioned.
Others include the arguments on Moon about which way is legit to trap the astronaut, which is a joke tbh.
If any way to trap him is legit, it doesn't matter how you do it. Be that (the legit way imo) trapping him behind an excavator, or the glitch to trap him it's just splitting hairs arguing over which way you do it.
I say play zombies how you want to, it's not as if playing Die Rise or Origins my way is much slower than the other ways. I think Die Rise took me like 7 hours and 20 minutes, and I actually enjoyed it all.
Same with Origins, although Origins playing the other way could be considerably faster. Maybe Die Rise is too.
You mention you got bored sitting in the elevator in Die Rise, will that's easy to fix, go and do it in the restaurant.
As you aren't playing for top of the boards, play it a challenging and fun way.
I'm sorry but for personal enjoyment you can't say will that's the legit way of doing it so that's the way I will play it.
The main difference between BO1 and BO2 was the lack of strategy making in BO2 due to some of the things we are discussing.
The lack of traps makes a big difference, as does the way the wonder weapons work.
Treyarch really dropped the ball in that regard, in my opinion. It's not the weapons, it's as much their map designs.
Five strategies were being developed after BO2 was dropped, which says a lot about how good that game was.
No-one really cares about BO2, for good reasons.