What? What you just described is literally a perfectly balanced lobby lmao. That’s how it SHOULD work. Currently, it places the best player with the 5 worst players vs everyone else.

A balanced lobby would have less than 1 standard deviation between the top and bottom in kill count. What I described has about 2 standard deviations, which is far too large a variance in skill. So, top slayer should have about 25, with the bottom at 10. That doesn't sound like much of a difference from what I described before, but the first will have people complaining about horrible matchmaking and thinking they had no chance, and the second will have players thinking "I could have done a little better...I have to fix my mistakes".

You aren’t describing lobby balancing... You could have the 2 best players in the world and the 2 worst players in the world split between two teams, and by definition that’s a balanced lobby. You’re advocating for SBMM which is a completely separate discussion. Even in lobbies with SBMM, there’s a certain amount of deviation between players that requires skill distribution between teams.

Maybe you are finally starting to understand. With Bungie's already suspect lobby balancing, if you don't limit the skill pool in some way, every lobby will be horribly unbalanced, even if a human being manually balanced every lobby after the 12 players were chosen by the "connection" algorithm. Essentially, it is not possible to balance a lobby where two players are top 15% and two players are bottom 40%. The naive "balance" that people suggest of putting the "best" players on separate teams, the next best on separate teams, etc., still results in a very lopsided match because the top players rarely engage each other, and the bottom players don't live long enough to engage each other. So, it comes down to which team gets that second zone first, and then the mercy (or worse, a blowout without mercy) happens. With less skill division between top and bottom on a team, it's easier to balance the lobby because the decisions aren't as critical, and because the lower skilled players can actually contribute by capturing zones with fewer players, holding zones with fewer players, etc. Yes, Bungie's lobby balancing sucks regardless of what what matchmaking they use, and it will give bad results. But, it gives a lot fewer bad results when skill is taken into account in the matchmaking. Everything goes out the window with larger fireteams (4 or more), though, and you'll get terrible lobbies whenever that happens, even with skill-based matchmaking.