Mahonagy, if you re read my post you will notice that I never said that pp doesn't encourages competing against yourself, but my critique is against the lack of resources to compete against yourself. You can play this game offline, enjoy it as much as you can in multiplayer with friends, enjoy the songs, but this game promotes too much competing against others in an atmosphere where a newbie would find really skilled players who maybe didn't play osu too much, but at least played other rhythm games. And to add more salt to the problematic, and to understand what I meant with "The rank system is broken", you just need to put some very high rank players to play some old maps with low AR, or let some of them play slow BPM streams, or weird patterns, then ask yourself "what's hard?". Maybe you won't understand this right now.
So if this game is focused on competing against others, how are the newbies going to actually be able to compete against others? How do you except a 2015 player, that will play non-stop till 2018 to beat an old player who has experience in many kind of aspects including low AR, weird or disliked patterns among the players, slow BPM streams , etc... if the progression in this game is viewed mainly from a PP perspective?
Probably only experienced players in musical instruments or other rhythm games like the beatmania series, will be able to successful improve correctly and then they will have a chance to compete against the others.
At least this guide is a very good resource to obtain knowledge and maybe a good preparation for what this game is making you want, talking in broad terms.
Don't bother answering this reply, since I don't have time to read this again and I left standar a long time ago, but came back a bit for o!m, but I will be totally AFK from now.