There's no low rank ranked animore

Legitimate casual players started abandoning this game several seasons back. I still find them here and there in the bowels of pubs, but they're far fewer in number than the smurfs you described. The smurfs are everywhere. I've had plenty of matches with a small grey bar as far to the left of the curve as you can get... and there are some players in those matches who don't seem to know much about the game, but there are many, many others who shoot and coordinate with their teammates like they're platinum bucking for diamond. This is just the nature of a six year old game with terrible anti-cheat and a developer who actively encourages players to run secondaries.