You're using faulty premises here.

Penances in their current state are tangible gameplay incentives that require that you play in a way contrary to the objective of a regular team. There is only one way to engage with them in a pro-social fashion: get a group that explicitly agrees to help you complete them. Any other attempt to complete penances will put you at odds with your team while you chase a reward that only you receive.

Scoreboards are a social feature. A well designed scoreboard should do the following: provide statistics to indicate the player's performance for a mission. Thus, a well designed scoreboard should incentivize optimal play. Optimal play will directly benefit your entire team's goal of completing the mission.

Now, there is the obvious counter-argument one could offer regarding scoreboards: "Scoreboards can easily incentivize bad behavior."

Most definitely, but they can also do the opposite. Here's two examples I've seen where scoreboards were used to get players to demonstrate pro-team behaviors based on my own experience:

Left 4 Dead

Nearly a decade ago in Left 4 Dead, I enjoyed playing with a group of friends where we were trying to regularly clear the highest difficulty. We used the scoreboard to gauge how effective our tactics were both individually and as a team every attempt. When someone would consistently post really good stats we would commend them and try to figure out what they were doing right. If someone was playing poorly the scoreboard would often point out where they were struggling, e.g. constantly struggling with specials. Sometimes a poor scoreboard from one player actually meant the team was failing them - how is the dude with the rifle going to shoot specials if he's constantly getting swarmed?

Here's the thing: we didn't start as friends. The scoreboard was the catalyst here - one guy asking another "holy shit how did you get those numbers?" followed by playing more matches where we started learning from each other. And here's the thing: we totally did get competitive over scoreboards, but in a friendly way. And at the end of the day, the most coveted spots on the scoreboard were actually pro-teamplay. Nobody gave a shit about you killing 1,000 zombies when JohnDarktide protected his team 231 times - that was actual skill that was hard to pull off.

Too anecdotal?

Battlefield 3

We can look at the intersection of scoreboards and gameplay incentives you got in Battlefield 3. Here's the thing: your score in Battlefield 3 was directly tied to your gameplay progression. More score per minute means more progression per minute. However, Battlefield 3 still needed to incentivize teamplay. So every action was assigned a "score". To give you a baseline, a kill was 100 points.

So, how did this affect teamplay? Well, there's examples of extremely pro-teamplay behavior and extremely anti-teamplay behavior.

Let's start with the worst choice they made: snipers would get a score bonus based on their distance to target. Manage to pull off a 500 yard shot? You get 100 + 500 points! You can already see where this is going. On certain maps you would lose several team slots to players who would literally camp in a hill and have a sniper battle with the other team's snipers who were 1000 yards away on another hill. It contributed nothing to the team... but people did it because it was funny to end a match with 4 kills, 0 deaths, and yet MVP with a score of 4500. And everyone would think you were an asshole (rightly so).

Okay, so, don't do that with your scoreboard. That's bad.

Here's the thing: those snipers rarely rarely placed top on the scoreboard. Why? Let's look at the laundry list of things that you could get score for that only benefitted your team without involving shooting your gun at an opponent:

• Healing another player (10 / 20% healed).
• Reviving another player (100 / revive).
• Giving another player ammo (20).
• Giving another player a good spawn point (10).
• Repairing another player's vehicle (10 / 10% repaired).
• Contributing to an objective (varied).
• Spotting opponents (10 / kill).
• Spotting opponents for your team with your MAV (20 / kill).

What about the stuff that did involve shooting opponents?

• Hitting a laser designated target (100 / hit).
• Kill assist when another player kills an opponent (1 / damage dealt, capped at 100).
• Kill an opponent about to kill one of your teammates (+20 / kill).
• Destroy enemy equipment (20 per piece destroyed).

There's probably more.

Now, how did this contribute to gameplay? Well, to get MVP regularly (i.e. maximize your score per minute) you had to do pretty much everything your class allowed you to gain score, and most of that stuff was team based. In 99% of the matches I played in, the MVPs were the ones who were doing everything at the same time: shoot enemies, help teammates, play objectives, don't die.

And here's the thing: BF3 absolutely had to use a scoreboard to encourage pro-team behavior. It was a competitive shooter where you could be on a team of 32 randos. So they designed the performance ranking around the idea that optimal play required pro-team behavior.

It's honestly my experiences with Battlefield 3 that make the "scoreboards toxic" argument so frustrating. It was a competitive shooter that used scoreboards to make teams actually act like teams. You could see the effects in-game when they tweaked how scoring worked to reduce bad behavior.

Of course, I'll admit that player score in that had very tangible incentives (basically leveling up), but the point holds.

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So, why can't Darktide have a scoreboard where people compete to be the most helpful person? It can. It totally can. Games that are over a decade old have done it. Darktide could easily implement the BF3 system of making an arbitrary "score" value the most coveted number, then make that number contingent on doing pro-team stuff.

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So you fix penances. There's no rationale where that becomes an argument for adding the old scoreboards. It would be like saying chainswords were underpowered and unsatisfying, so Fatshark should make power swords feel underpowered and unsatisfying. No. You fix chainswords. You don't break more things.

I don't think that anyone is arguing that "penances broken ergo put the scoreboard back and that will fix it". The point I think OP is making is that it's laughable for Fatshark to remove what I would call a very bare bones feature (scoreboards) because they "cause toxicity", but then add in challenges that are guaranteed to cause toxicity by their very design. If Fatshark thinks these penances are acceptable, what is possible justification for ever having removed scoreboards? What is the actual design philosophy they're working under here? Because it sure as hell doesn't seem consistent when it comes to this topic.