EA said:The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
This part made me laugh, to be honest, because the original Battlefront II (Y'know, the good one) did the same thing, by making the Hero character a reward for the best player on each team. You got that sense of pride and accomplishment from knowing that you are the best player in that battle, and your reward is a murder-machine character who will probably just get pied in the face with an anti-tank mine and killed instantly, because Battlefront II's online consisted mainly of people throwing mines at each other's heads.
Instead, EA's BF2 demands an amount of grinding that only whales will be able to achieve at a decent rate, and the reward will be a hero who, let's be honest, is probably equally vulnerable to tank mines and dealing with the misfortune of being a melee-focused character in a game where sniper rifles exist.