Here is my simple philosophy on how I think BF4 should be played:

Play to win.

What this means is that you should utilize the entirety of the games systems to your advantage. Leverage the games design (barring glitches or cheats) to provide yourself and your team with any edge that you can.

It has nothing to do with skill. It is a mindset.

If you have decided that there are parts of the game that you don’t like, that’s fine. To each their own. But if you have then also decided to ignore those parts, you are no longer playing to win. If you think shotguns are cheap, or that lock-ons require no skill, or that indirect fire is for noobs, you are not playing to win. You are playing some variation of the game that exists only in your mind. The rest of us are playing the actual game.