You only get points for grabbing the flag from the enemy base, so stat padders collaborated to earn points. You didn't see those "RANK_UP_NO_KILL", or "10K_POINTS/HOUR" servers before?
Before they turned off flag dropping, I did a little test in a local game because I was curious how the stat padders were getting points per minute in the
thousands. After a little experimentation, I figured it out. They set up a CTF game with a flag return time of 0, then get one guy on one team to stand on the opposing team's flag spawn, and a guy on the other team to stand in front of him. Then the guy on the flag just presses the triangle button, the flag gets tossed to the defender, it's instantly returned, and instantly grabbed again. Grab points for the taker, return points for the defender. Hammer the button and it's like rapid fire, very impressive.
Even if they removed the points for grabbing the flag, padders would just take turns, so they'd have to remove the flag return points as well. And then you'd see a lot more CTF games where people act like it's deathmatch since they'd have no motivation to have anything to do with the flag. :/
I also didn't like that they removed the flag drop, since it was pretty useful in certain ways, like giving it to a base camping teammate when I was of more use trying to get our flag back, or when I had no support on a flag run, dropping it temporarily to jump in a warhawk and take care of business myself. I also miss the 0 second flag return, since I played quite a few interesting games with that setting before. Plus I'm of the opinion that giving padders an easy way to pad is useful, since they have no fucking self-restraint and make themselves easily identifiable for Incognito's account nukers.
Admittedly, since they've turned flag dropping off, padders are a lot less prevalent on the leaderboards. And I don't think it's as bad as having friendly fire off as the default for new players, now that was a boneheaded move. >:|