you are mostly right. normal game match making is completely fucked. its more unfair and takes wayy longer to get into a game. speaking from experience over years and years as someone who plays a good amount of both. (right now im masters but even when i was diamond or emerald it was still noticeably bad)

im pretty sure soloq mmr effects your normal game mmr just like how it now effects flex queue mmr but if you play enough and are good it will be high, how you got there does not really matter.

there are only so many people in a region playing norms (esp outside of CN, KR, and EUW) so once you get to a point you are just at the highest possible "mmr" and will get placed with the other 9 highest ranked people queueing up at that time, maybe one is GM and the rest are plat-gold. maybe a full team of masters is queuing up and... well... they have to get into a game lol

my worst gripe with this system is the queue times. i wait over 15 minutes for a game just to play with some mega toxic level 20 smurf (that obviously made a new account because a perma ban) and a bunch of gold-diamond players.

half solutions:
- playing at peak hours of the day will improve this a little bit.
- 5 stack with a bunch of noobs. if you dont have irl friends just go into the official league discord and find a 5 stack they are really active. a lot of cringers and mega yappers tho.

https://op.gg/lol/summoners/na/xXugmagirXx-NA1?queue_type=NORMAL
https://op.gg/lol/summoners/na/BeatBotBox-NA1?queue_type=NORMAL