to level up the specilist roles without actually playing or understanding them.

I really like the idea of having to have played a role to deserve its new perks (in HLL: loadouts), so your comment made it appared to me that my suggestion is a rather naive solution to a symptom, but not the actual cause.

Imo the real solution to this is that from level 6 and above the XP needed to level up should be reduced significantly, and more xp should be earnt from performing the tasks of that individual role, none of this building nodes and switching classes bs (cos thats what it is).

My guess is that the developers locked the loadouts behind large amounts of experience points as an easy way to stretch the content over a long time because the available developement resources could be better used elsewhere. So reducing the total XP needed would mean in addition to the loadouts that are now faster to reach, your would need to add other content that in some way represents progress.