Normal difficulty in this game is equivalent, actually, maybe a tier below the LFR difficulty of wow. It is meant for PUG's and casual's to be cleared quickly with little to no wiping. The auto assignment system is working as intended via round robin. As far as the bugged chests, the way around this is to not wipe on the bosses and that won't bug out loot near as much. Which in all honesty, if you're doing on Normal, lol.
They do need to remove the ML option from normal however.