Ok, so here is the real question.

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@reconzero wrote:
@Unitee01

"Seems everyone would rather play the same lobby over and over while being given a false sense of achievement"

If this is the result that Apex sbmm is producing for you then I would say that you are definitely an outlier. I doubt very much that there are five people in this game who would say, "Apex mostly gives me fair and balanced matches. My squadmates are usually at my skill level and so are my enemies." SBMM is so poorly implemented in this game that it either won't bother to match players of similar skill, or the skill range in this game is so incredibly wide that even players who are near-adjacent on the rank ladder have big differences in ability. I tend to believe the latter, although again, I think people vastly underestimate the role of luck in this game. And a guy who gets really lucky can certainly give the appearance of a guy who is a predator/streamer.

On the subject of games that do without sbmm Destiny 2 comes immediately to mind as a game that went without and went without and went without... right up until it didn't. And Call of Duty has used sbmm since 2007. If the trend over time is to adopt it rather than reject it, then I would call that proof-of-concept.

I'm not trying to paint a picture of sunshine and unicorns here. SBMM is an ugly, twisted, convoluted, opaque, and annoying feature of games which are intentionally designed to be incredibly difficult to play well. I would rather have games be less difficult, have shallower skill curves. But that will never happen, and that's why even the worst sbmm is a necessity, imo.

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Again my brother,

AMEN!

No online only game survives driving off the casual part of their player base.

The problem is, usually, they are the least vocal. You don't know they are unhappy, just one day they are gone and then the lack of population makes everything less for those that remain, and the slow bleed begins.