I think you are aiming at the wrong spot, as you are comparing Private/Community/League racing with a Public Ranked system.
Of course a well run community/league will have better races than being matched up against randoms, because with a community event you can set your own ground rules and have live stewards in every race, and eventually know which drivers are trustworthy or not .
In comparison, most public ranked online races, such as Sport Mode, iRacing, LMU etc. have to find a solution that can work for any driver, at any time, from anywhere, of any skill, without the guarantee that you can spare a real human being to officiate every lobby.
It's not even a issue limited to racing games, as public matchmaking lobbies in any game will inevitably have a wider range of quality. It's the risk you take when you throw a bunch of unrelated players with different objectives and abilities into a blender.
As someone who has plenty of Team Fortress 2 experience, I've run the gamut of public lobby quality. It's just something you have to deal with when you are participating in that kind of matchmaking
It's amazing how quickly we all forget. Until GT Sport, ALL rooms were run totally without any auto stewarding. That's a mere nine years ago. A lifetime maybe for a young teenager, but it seems like yesterday to those of us that have been playing GT (and other racing games) for decades.
It might, given where driving standards have gone in Sport Mode, be very difficult to imagine this, but once upon a time we used to have a MASSIVE user lobby system that was run by hosts. Yes, there were organized leagues, but of course, you had to race at their schedule, in their car and track choices. But the 'casual' lobbies weren't all wreckfest demolition derbies. How was that achieved?
Firstly, you titled your room. Clean, no rules, stock, tuners, Shuffle, whatever. Secondly, back before the horror of Spirt Mode, the de facto standard for clean racing was the GT Planet Online Rules (GTP OLR). And even there, in casual rooms, a bunch of the more league focused rules were ignored.
But the primary contact rules were easy to understand, and revolved around SELF stewarding. The rules usually expected the driver to return position for passing with contact, cutting track, forcing another driver off, etc.. Not a timed ghost penalty. Return position. Easy to understand, easy to serve. Flagrant violators got kicked and the lobby system blocked their re-entry for 24 hours (if the lobby stayed open that long!).
There were rules that governed defense (no weaving, no moving in the braking zone, one defensive move only) that are completely ignored in sport Mode and quite honestly, completely break any degree of realism to the sport of racing! It's like a soccer game that allows players to pick up the ball and throw it in the net... It might be a video game, but it sure as heck ain't soccer!
The real tragedy is that there is a new generation of sim racers that can't even CONCEIVE that a community could police themselves in casual lobbies and provide years of good clean racing. I can only assure you that we did. And I feel sorry for those so lost in the current travesty they can't see themselves doing it again.
