I agree with your sentiment, but IMO a major reason that the loss of Bar does not feel impactful is how the game is currently being played on public servers. The lack of communication and teamwork is one part of this equation that's already been discussed to death, but another thing I've noticed is how the current scoring system really punishes assaulting the enemy base and how that affects unit choice, especially for the Allies. You can bring a building down to 5% health in an impressive display of teamwork but in terms of points you'll end up in the red due to all the tanks you lost. It's generally not worth assaulting the enemy base unless your opponents are severely incompetent.
This is why Soviets tend to dominate right now, because they can pretty much sit in field all game and pick off Allied tanks one-by-one with their superior armor, sometimes throwing V3 rockets at base defenses for easy points when it's safe. Tesla Troopers and Desolators kind of suck at base infiltration but dominate on the field due to their strong anti-armor and anti-infantry capabilities and squish immunity. On the other hand, as the "specialist" faction, Allies are kind of at a disadvantage with how the scoring works. Many of their strategies revolve around coordinated surprise attacks on a single target, like prism tank rushes, black eagle strikes, Tanya+Seal Nighthawk C4 rushes etc., but when these attempts fail the Allies are punished inordinately in scoring after they've already wasted so many credits and time they could have spent plinking soviet tanks with howitzers for easy points.
Once scoring is normalized so base assault tactics aren't so heavily discouraged, you'll see much more of an impact of Allies losing Bar and WF since they'll be less afraid of doing sneaky Nod shit. I know you detest Marathon but I think the vanilla/X crowd tends to prefer it because you see more base destruction outside of a PUG environment. I think AOW could be fixed with trial and error