I have a few things to say myself.
As someone who has ran LRM builds for some time, I have been criticized for "wasting" a dire-wolf by putting LRM's on a direwolf build (that also happens to have non-missile armaments that of late, have been getting more kills than the missiles). Only for some of those same people to come out with a win. As far as getting locks go, I find that locking on a target you're shooting at, where possible, helps with accuracy (especially if the enemy has utilized a camouflage paint to blend in with some environments. That, and you help the LRM builds out.
LRMs may not bank a lot of kills in and of themselves, but they ARE a good psychological weapon as unending streams of missile death forces your enemies to disengage from an otherwise winnable combat scenario with the foe they're facing off against.
As for the so-called "Call of Duty" crowd that hates LRMs and the like to the point of not helping their team-mates or trolling them - put bluntly, it has been my experience that they are not terribly good at this game, nor is it a good fit for them. It has been my observation that they do not:
1) follow instructions
2) fight for and with the team, and thus typically wind up being the first players blown up in any given match (excluding fast/light mech scouts whose intelligence gathering goes horribly awry, and they run into 5-ALL of the enemy mechs), and...
3) Control their tempers, and so are prone to throwing tantrums to the point of shooting at team mates (which helps the enemy win) - Ran into one such guy today who shot at and nearly cored my Direwolf because he didn't like my approach to fighting an enemy - needless to say, his reckless actions contributed to me getting killed. Fair warning - doing this is good way to get marked, and once marked, you (the guy that thinks it's cute to shoot at team mates because you're "frustrated") will find yourself dying a lot more because it is decided that the team is better off with you getting abandoned and blown up (keeping within the rules - those who care not will probably just blow you up themselves) since you decided to become the 13th player on the enemy team.
That's right, I said 13th enemy player because such mentality basically gives the enemy team one extra player, and the team you're "on" effectively has one less player so it's 11 vs 13 instead of 12 vs 12 as it should be. Don't be a dezgra - be a team member that your trothkin / battle brothers can count on, and put your ego aside for the greater good of the team! You won't always win, but you will certainly win more games in the long run.
Having said that, this is a team coordination game like you said Old Bob - especially the Community Warfare, which no one really plays anymore (not to the extent that it was in the old days). I think part of the reason is that the defenders are typically heavily favored on some maps, and like I said above, the haters who grief missile-boat players also lack the skill and tactical acumen to play Communiy Warfare (a game mode where you CANNOT just play the way you want and damn everyone else [which is the way they want to play]) - it's a mode where EVERYONE must work together with a unified stratagem to win. Granted, LRM's are not a good choice on most CW maps thanks to the way everything is laid out, but the attitudes present that cause a team with LRMs to lose a regular game will inevitably doom the CW match of any team unfortunate enough to have them aboard to failure.*
What makes people hate LRM's is the fact that they're the only weapon that can ignore a player's direct line of sight so long as targeting information is fed via UAV or another player. What a lot of them don't know is that you can throw off LRM's by shutting your mech down, and then rebooting to get away - once the lock is lost, the missiles will go haywire, and will only seek again if someone is providing them locks (or worse, they never stop seeking because someone is providing targeting information as a ninja sniper). Aside from AMS, you cannot shoot the missiles down and you sometimes cannot shoot back at the guy that's firing them.
Aside from shutting down your mech once behind cover to screw up the locks, a tactic I've seen work against LRM-boat players is to over-run their positions and cut them down - Most LRM-boat builds are not built for close-range engagements, so once a brawler gets in good shooting range with a clean line of sight, it's game over for the LRM unless they've managed to do enough damage, and can try to finish the job with whatever non-missile weapons or SRM's they might have.
Anyways, insightful video, +1.
* As an aside, the skilled meta players who discourage LRM use have a solid point about why it's a bad idea to use LRM's in Community Warfare, and they're decently good at the game. They don't grief players who use LRMs, and are willing to give advice and links to solid builds (as my former team mates from Mercstar did for me when I was once in their ranks before going inactive for a year+).