Honestly, I'm of the same opinion as you.
There should be Servers that are Multiplayer with no Bots. The Traditional BF experience. Their little experiment with starting with bots than backfilling with players just is not working; see the video I attached as an example.
Then there should be options, perhaps locally hosted, for people that just want to solo or coop with bots.
Let challenges and experience be done in either (who cares is someone farmed bots just to get past 300 suppression, the challenges are dumb to start with, and gadgets/gear/battlepass progress should not be tied to those dumb challenges).
Then just collect 2 sets of stats: one set of multiplayer (no bots) and one set of solo/coop (with bots).
I honestly don't understand how DICE got to the position it is in, but I'm guessing it started with the Idea that their Portal system will be able to handle it all; and it just doesn't. Fix the issues by:
- Implement official servers and provide a server browser for them. No Bots.
- Have matchmaking find matches in the server browser, nothing more.
- Provide Solo/Coop option to launch a locally hosted "server" for the player and their friends to play against bots.
- Remove challenges from battlepass and adjust Exp. requirements for battlepass to account for no points gained from challenges.
- Rework kit unlocks so they don't require challenges to complete. This was a horrible idea and should be walked back.
- Let Portal still be used for creative. This would have its own browsing tool.
- Let Portal create community servers that compliment the Official Servers with custom map rotations and mutators, but no bots. These would be browsable in the standard server browser, since it has limited mutator availability and is mostly just curated BF matches.
Do those things and the experience would be much better. People wouldn't be farming challenges as much. Creative and Bot servers would not be flooding the server browser for people looking for legit matches. Communities could still setup their own custom play list servers. PvE players would have an easy to get to option to just play against bots with their friends.