Portal Team Composition Issue

Hello.  Not sure this is the right place to post this, but here's hoping.

Up front, I really like 2042 and think the furor present in most of the player base is perplexing.

Anyway:  I have a handful of friends who are older (like me) and not hardcore gamers.  In an ideal world, we'd like to be able to play together for kicks and laughs against bots like the solo/co-op mode allows.  The problem is that our group is too big to be supported by the cap currently in place for co-op.

I attempted to remedy this via Portal by setting up an experience where the HUMAN players are all supposed to be assigned to 'Team 1' with the other team comprised of AI bots.  This works for one round but, each time a map cycles, some number of human players (a squad's worth, usually) are split off and put on the opposite team.  Presumably, this is because the idea of balancing human players is prioritized higher than any Portal setting to keep a primarily human team.

It may be that I simply have the settings wrong in the experience somehow.  If that's it, I'd love to hear how to fix it.  If not, I'd want to raise a flag to either raise the cap of people who can co-op (perhaps including a larger squad size than 4, too) or allow people more control of balancing/team composition in Portal.  

Thanks!