As a chess player, I would much prefer it if instead of showing leaderboard placement players were ranked similarly to the ELO chess system.
I find this a more informative and competitive way of ranking.
The leaderboards are annoying for a couple of reasons:
1. Say there are 500 people with a hidden MMR of between 1500 and 1550 and my MMR is 1525 and I lose two games, I just lost 250 spaces on the leaderboards. Now, since the MMR is hidden, I have no idea that in reality my rating only dropped very slightly, but it looks like there was a drastic shift in my playing performance.
2. There is no way to see the dropoff between the very highest ranked players and those who are much lower. Is the guy at the top of the leaderboards ranked 2900? and the guy at spot 100 ranked 1700? There is no way to quantify the difference between players other than their spot #.
3. The artificial leaderboard decay makes the leaderboards completely worthless. Who knows how many people havent played a game in over a week but actually are ranked higher than I am? Making MMR visible and adding a set rate of decay would help this problem a lot.