Now I have every single gun and perk for every single class. Do you get anything for leveling up beyond 22?
What's the proper way to play recon if hiding on the other side of the map isn't?
You shouldn't need to get that far away from the enemies unless you just want to shoot random people. The good thing about recon is that if you play it stealthy, you can do A LOT of damage all at once by throwing C4 on their tanks or mortaring a spot they're all sitting at. You should be really aggressive when playing as that class actually.
Honestly, my favorite sniper rifle is the VSS snaiperkaya which is a 20 shot, fully auto, silenced gun where each bullet only does about as much damage as the engineer SMG bullets. It actually plays a lot like Special Ops class in BF2 where you try to keep away from direct infantry combat but do some huge hits on the other team by blowing up their tanks or mortaring the spot where they're all guarding. You can also throw out motion mines to easily find where they're all going.
The only situation where the extremely accurate, bolt-action sniper rifles are the best thing to use is when you need to be able to take out another sniper really.