I have no idea of these "established communities" but if your wish is to Rambo through machine gun fire, laughing at artillery fire, then maybe Battlefield Heroes would be more like your cup of tea, rather than FH2.
Totally agree with your whole post, that was the reason to add our supression effect ™.
The argument of those players was: we were trying to force a psychologic limitation to their gaming performance, and who the hell are we to do that, that we were party poppers, fun killers, fascists, whatever, you name it.
Some of the arguments were reasonable: systems with low specs suffered an excesive punch in their performance, the trigger range was too short and he could supress himself near walls, etc, but we must be honest, a bunch of players didn't like the supression effect and they were not vanilla casuals, most of them were FH1 veterans.
Bottom line: it was a bitter polemic, not worthy...