Why is the community not making a bigger deal about horrible matchmaking?

Player base isn't big enough.  The wait times are already ridiculous sometimes, if they matched people based on skill, the wait would be even longer.  It stinks, but until they start making a better product, people aren't gonna come back to this franchise.

The community has made a big deal about the matchmaking.  Ever since they made the change to the current system in NHL 25 it's been a regular bone of contention with players ( including myself ) bringing up all of the same points you're making.

EA obviously feels differently.  For them the priority is that teams find a match-up quickly even if it doesn't result in a game being played.

The reason most commonly given is that the player base is too small to support more granular matchmaking.  I feel like the current matchmaking system is just going to make the situation worse by chasing new and lower skilled players away over time.  Sending these players immediately into a meat grinder against elite teams is not the way to retain players.  There can be a benefit to playing teams better than yours to see how they play and learn from it, but that only works to an extent.   Once the skill gap gets too big, the losing team isn't learning how to get better, they're just getting beat down and I don't see how that helps grow the player base.

But EA isn't wrong on this one.  The player base isn't big enough, I've been in lobbies where I can't find a 6's game for a good 10, 15 mins sometimes and just give up finding one, and a lot of the times it's on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  Imagine if matchmaking went skill based, it would be even longer.  I do think one problem is people who should really be playing clubs squad up in drop ins and just beat up on randoms thrown together on a team, but not sure how you fix that issue.

I have encountered the same issues, its ridiculous and makes me not want to play the game anymore. I've been a nhl loyalist since the 90s and I love chel, but its just not fun to just start playing the game and immediately play a diamond or platinum. Its not fun getting curb stomped every game by people with 1200 goals when the games been out for 3 weeks. 

To be fair you're talking about drop-ins ( or at least it sounds like it ) while OP and myself are talking about club games.  I can't speak about the population for drop-ins as I haven't played any significant number of drop-in games in over a decade ( mostly because drop-in games were some of the most toxic, frustrating gaming experiences of my life which might explain a lower player count there ).   But as for clubs, in all the years I've played ( since 09 ) the only times my club found it difficult to find games would be in the dog days of summer, and even then we'd find games relatively quickly.

I do agree that drop-ins should be for individuals looking for games and not organized teams looking to beat up on a bunch of disorganized randoms.   

I worry EA is in a spiral of declining player count.   Low player count leads to uneven matches ( in both number of players and skill level ) which further frustrates players driving them away lowering the player count even more.  

Ah, yeah.  I play both club and drops.  Club is harder to matchmake I feel, the only time games are more fair is usually around playoff time when you match up against other clubs around your skill level.  On the other side, I've also played club games where we should have absolutely wiped the floor against the team we played against and didn't for some reason (me and my club teammates have our theories) 

To me anyway, the community seems to have finally and publicly/vocally had enough; of course, this has never stopped EA Sports before

Players begged and pleaded on forums, on Reddit, in comment sections for a fix on the matchmaking during the NHL 26 pre-order window. They ignored every single question to get as many pre-orders as possible. Really disgusting stuff. 

Nothing about this game screams next-gen. Should've been cross-gen to keep the numbers high WITH a PC release. That's... just too much for EA these days, I guess.

This game is so unbelievably broken.  It literally takes no skill, no need to setup up shots. You just take the same shot over and over that is a guaranteed goal every time.  Its so frustrating for people that actually work for the shots.