Its a competitive game of comparing scores, yes. But its a lot more exciting then it sounds, and there is a lot of community with a lot of great people built around the progress and continuity of the Meta and the AltMeta(which is like the Meta but scores things differntly, better in my opinion).
And I feel your pain about DA, I didnt have it for 3 months after the release and had to endure quite a lot of raving threads about how great it is. Once that settled down however the more experienced players came out with threads that painted a much worse picture of DA. In my opinion they were just pissed cause all their high point strategies had to be reworked