Personally I think Elo hell exists, and I think I have a good explanation for why "great" players don't experience elo hell, but merely "good" players do.
Elo systems are all about statistics. The more games you play, the more accurate your rating will be. The issue is that lower ranks have far more statistical noise in them because unskilled players have no idea how to prevent a snowball, and afking is far more pervasive. If you're a challenger tier player, your actual rank is so far above bronze that you're still going to rocket out of bronze pretty quickly as your rank regresses to the mean. If you're a silver or gold level player, on the other hand, then your skill level is much closer, so regression to the mean doesn't have as strong an effect.
Example:
Assume that for every 10 "fair" (no feeders, no afk) games you play your elo will get 10% closer to your true elo value, on average. Let's also assume that for every fair game in bronze you also have to play an unfair one.
A plat player with 2000 true elo will go from 1000 to 1200 in 10 fair games. 10 is doubled to 20 games total when you include all the unfair games they had to play to net those 10 fair ones, but that's still getting out of bronze in a weekend of play on average (no big deal).
Now let's look at a "pretty good" player. A player with true elo 1500 (on the fence between silver and gold) would only go from 1000 to 1050 in their 10 games. To get out of bronze (elo=1200) they'll need to play 50 games, which doubles to 100 when you include all the unfun, unfair games they have to play to net those 100 fair games. The important thing to note is that they will have to play FIVE TIMES the number of unfair/unfun games to get out of bronze.
Finally, let's take a look at an "average" player with true elo 1350 (middle of the pack silver). They take 90 "fair" games to get out of bronze, which is 180 games total when unfair games are taken into account. Even if you play 8 hours a day, that's going to take weeks to get through, and roughly 1/4th of those games are going to be feature an afk or feeder on your team.
So you can kind of see that both sides are right about elo hell. On the one hand, being a better player will get you out of elo hell faster, so some people will argue elo hell doesn't exist because skill will save you. On the other hand, it seems unfair to tell average, silver level players that their choices are:
- learn how to play at a gold level (despite not having any in-game exposure to good players)
- play a ton of extra games with feeders/afkers on their team
- just quit ranked.
That's why I believe elo hell exists; the instability of bronze games leads to a really poor game experience for your average player.
I'd like to end with a disclaimer that I pulled this model out of my ass, and the constants are probably all wrong. However, I think it does a good job of explaining why high skill players doubt the existence of elo hell while average players are frustrated by it. It also explains why you frequently hear about people getting out of bronze only to rocket straight to gold or platinum: the skill level required to get out of bronze in a reasonable amount of games requires you to be much better than just silver, and once you get into silver you stop having the massive amount of statistical noise that bronze introduces.
