Hey folks! Thanks for the questions/thoughts. To clarify a couple things with the matchmaking changes for GSF:
The goals:
Get matches to pop more frequently. Get those matches to be more fairly balanced.
Cross faction teams helps achieve both of these goals. It makes hitting a critical mass of players to start a match more stable and easier to achieve. It also gives the matchmaker the ability to sort through ALL of the players to arrange the best possible match.
A few points about premade groups:
Premade groups no longer count as the average rating of all the ships. They now count everyone in the group as the same as the highest rated player in the group. The matchmaker will attempt to make the most even teams possible. Given this, a premade group with at least 1 highly experienced player would be more apt to be matched up with less experienced/less upgraded players.
Matches should be much more fairly matched across the board after these changes are put into place. This, admittedly, does not cure every ill caused by premade groups of highly skilled player. But it should help to mitigate the issues and improve the quality of matches across the board.