I agree with the math. There are more core players. Unfortunately, on a social standpoint, their fifty bucks is no more important, than oura(hardcore). The fact remains, Ive bought every call of duty game there is, bought every map, and dedicated most of my gaming time to playing these. I was actually content, not happy, but content with my Friday Night Hardcore clan op, when it finally started. Of course now it's gone again.  I don't see what the big deal is really. I'm no expert programmer, don't claim to be, but to make 9 clan ops, and 2 of those being hardcore, is a bit of a spit in the face to 25% of your customer base, because they didn't want to open up source code and edit a few lines? No matter what you're selling, if the capability is there to appease ALL of your fan base, why not just suck it up, be a big boy, and do it? I'd much rather be happy with elite than not happy with it. Life's easier when you're happy. My life happens to contain a lot of elite. Therefore, as far as Elite is concerned, I don't feel like I got what I paid for, and was promised to me. Other than that life is golden. I'm still vertical yo.

Another option is just to make the ops the particular objective and allow the players to choose whether to play core or hardcore. If you think there is an advantage to one mode and want to play it for that advantage, go ahead. If you prefer to play core or hardcore in spite of the "disadvantage" have fun playing the op with your team and see where your score falls.

I like the new dom and kc modes where they are score vs. captures, although collecting tags makes sense in kc and there should be some bonus for being on the winning team. Playing the objective and winning the game can sometimes result in lower scores for dom. I don't know if the same is true for KC.

I think the biggest improvement for ops is functioning leaderboards and posting a dynamic target of where approximately gold and silver levels are.