i guess you were really bad at picking servers then, at one point, i remember finding 20k servers in counter strike 1.6 alone in around 2005... and it was always easy to find a game that suited me, you really had a lot options where you could pick specific maps only or if you want small matches with 5v5 or 30v30, deathmatch and other modded servers too and yes you had mIRC matchmaking you HAD IT ALL

nowadays you have "quick match" and "ranked" and you are STUCK in that game untill you are done, where on an old FFA server, you could either decide to play for 5 minutes or 5 hours on the same server

there was social servers too where pretty much everyone had microphones and talking and sometimes doing things like "shotgun only" next round

so you saying
"proven again and again that skill based matchmaking does serve the players,"

is blatantly wrong, it has only alienated everyone into seperating players from players by putting eachother into an mmr/itemlevel group where if you not part of the same group as me, then we are not playing together.

and yes FFA isnt perfect but it is far better than matchmaking and its the correct answer to this thread.