It is true that even in the binary case, the above bound is weaker than the Hamming bound for small $\delta$, but that can be rectified through the second MRRW bound whose existence I hinted at without going into details. You may be right that my question is less specific and more exploratory. I was initially surprised that the MRRW bound deteriorates so much for large q that it gets worse than the Singleton bound, and mainly wanted some affirmation of this. I'd be grateful if someone could direct me to useful references on comparisons of different bounds for large $q$.

@quid: Sorry, I asked the same questions there too. For a while, Overflow was disabled for maintenance and wasn't accepting new questions, hence I tried other available forums too. If thats wrong on my part, I apologize for it.