I have never been happy with EA app either. They took away the ability to manage game invites / join friends through the friends list, and also capped the friends list at 99.. Come on EA.
As someone who sunk nearly 4800 hours into Dragon Age Inquisition, most of which in the multiplayer, getting a lot of abroad friends by doing so, I feel it being way to cumbersome nowadays to play that game, due to the old netcode often causes you to be stuck in an infinite loading screen, if your ping is too high. With Origin, you could get around this by joining someone else's lobby, and then re-joining the player that you were going to play with.
This does not work anymore, and you are forced to restart the game, everytime this happens.