Was reading through this discussion and I think mainly what a lot of us are looking for are persistent servers for normal matchmaking...so we can have proper map rotation, more than 3 friends join us, and for the regions outside the US and EU with lesser population...not have the lobbies disband and throw them into bot lobbies after every round.
Obviously, Dice has said portal is the answer to all this and you were asking what features is portal missing that the old system had. One large issue with portal servers is that even the vanilla or "official" experiences aren't seeded from any quick match option (like the older games), so it becomes much harder to fill the portal servers because a sizeable chunk of the player base won't bother to look in the browser. Not to mention that any normal portal server is buried among tons of crappy ones with weird rules so it's hard to find normal servers in the browser anyways. The filters to try to sort for normal servers are terrible too and frequently reset. Heck, even the official rules filter basically got broken a couple weeks ago since no experiences get the "official rules" tag anymore for some reason. Another problem is there's no team balancing option if one team has too many players, and there's no way to switch teams for balance. The admin can't even switch people between teams. Also, as of a couple days ago, now you need 20 players in a non-bot portal match to even get it to start. That makes it very hard to get a server going. Separately, the experience search is a whole other problem as it doesn't show any servers that are full...it only shows the ones that have some free slots or are empty...so people will think no one is playing some of those experiences if they use that search. We should at least be given the option to see the full servers in the experience search so we can choose to wait in queue like we can when using the server browser.
Most people just want to go back to the old server system they had from before bf2042 since matchmaking and the servers and browser were all tied together rather than two separate things like they are now. And most of the problems that we have now didn't exist in the old system. Dice could possibly make portal a viable substitute but so far it seems like they are unable to make the improvements necessary to make that happen. Plus they had 4 years during bf2042 to make a viable hybrid system and they weren't able to get it right then either. That's a lot of years to not get this right. They should just give up and go back to the old system.
Exactly what I was trying to say brother.
