About Rank mode update in S31・32

Legend Banning: Seems to me like punishing players for learning the game, perfecting their meta, and trying to optimize their score and rank. On the other hand, it only affects high-level players, like drop zones, so why would I really care one way or the other?

Scoring Adjustments for Wide Skill Lobbies: This will be a devil-in-the-details situation. It's nice that they've acknowledged how bad the matchmaking is, but this "fix" needs to be more than just a gesture. Will it be?

End of "Road to Ranked": RTR was only ever there as a token discouragement of secondaries. Removing it is completely in keeping with Respawn's unstated goal of making sure that the game is populated by 10,000,000 individual accounts even if they're all owned by the same 15,000 players. Which they are. So in answer to your question "Do the developers want to promote smurfing?" the answer is yes. They always have wanted to and they still want to now.  They're apparently always looking for new and novel ways to do just that.

Open League, Pro Am, New Rank Tiers: I'm not understanding the need for this at all, except perhaps as a developer subterfuge to obscure the way they've allowed diamond and master to bloat, destroying the meaning of a bell curve as well as the value of a high rank. When any competent player can reach diamond, and the peak of the curve moves so far to the left, then suddenly platinum is the new silver and diamond is just a reward for showing up. It feels subjectively like a nicer reward than a platinum badge, which is why they allow it to happen, but it's hard to imagine any reasonably intelligent player being fooled. Maybe I'm giving players too much credit.

All in all I'm not really sure what to say. It all has the look and feel of more change for the sake of change, especially new rank tiers. I guess we'll all just have to wait and see how it shakes out in practice. You just can't ever tell anything from what they say on paper.