I hate the matchmaking and it's souring my experience playing the game.

I get that there is no SBMM, but the game simply isn't all that fun for me the way it is now. I hate having to play against 90% ghosts that are ranked way above me and EVERY single ghost having a board that is a well-oiled machine when I can barely fill out my board or otherwise fill it with crap that doesn't work together at all.

It makes it feel like the only effective way to play the game is looking up meta builds and sticking to them, and that's the most mind-numbingly boring way to play a game like this IMO. I want to learn the game organically by playing it and trying stuff out but there's simply no good way to do that. There's no way to tell what kind of works or what absolutely doesn't work because it all loses horribly to experienced players or meta builds.

I don't even understand what the point is of having a hierarchy of ranks in the game if not to make separate matchmaking pools, or at least making it part of it. Is it purely just vanity?

I absolutely believe the game needs something, if maybe not exactly like SBMM like commonly understood, some way to separate players. New players need the space to learn and explore the game without constantly getting steamrolled. I need to play against ghosts of other new/"shitty" players like myself. Maybe not exclusively, maybe there could be a mix, but right now I'm only playing against way more experience players and/or meta builds and after every run I just don't feel like I had a good experience.