From my personal experience with working my way up through a Battalion(Galactic Marine specifically) and being involved with SOBDE as long as I have been, I would say yes to your first question. Especially considering the amount of people that fail on the simplest things in our tryouts. Most of the time people don't even make it past faces and formations. But everyone has their own view and opinions on things, and I can understand why some people would feel differently than I do.
As far as the respect thing, I don't know where this came from. I never said that SOBDE members should be more respected than anyone else. I think I would do a terrible job as a BCMD for a normal Battalion. Too many people to manage and keep track of. I have as much respect for people like Rex and Bacara as I do for people like Boss and Niner.
Typically, people inside SOBDE pride themselves on being above-average with most things, and that is a by-product of the difficulty of the tryouts. There are very few, if any cases of someone passing the tryouts and not being at least decent with PVP, Leadership, and well above average RP skills. That does not mean that there are not members within Battalions that excel at these areas, but there is a higher concentration of them within SOBDE.
SOBDE members are required to work with their Outreaches pretty frequently. Lately, we've been a little lax because of all the changes happening, having to alter or remake the tryouts every other day for various reasons. We've had to remove a fair number of people recently for either not allotting their time properly to their SOBDE job or failing to stay true to the standards that we hold ourselves to. Within the past month or so we've had to remove 4 or 5 people for a variety of reasons. The tiniest slip ups can get you removed so you have to be on your best behavior most of the time. Again, this doesn't mean that other Battalions don't hold their members to high standards, but I've seen some members of Battalions that have done things that would get them removed from an SOBDE position on the spot.