Joining a battle is like flipping a coin to decide if I will love or hate Dust. The coin seems to be landing on the unfavorable side a lot more.

I get on, play with some standard suits and maybe some advanced guns to try to have some fun, but I'm just grouped against squads of prototype suits and duvolle ARs.
Sometimes I get on and the battle is one-sided in the favor of my team because of protostomping, and that makes the battle even worse; I often quit battles like that just from the boredom.
Sometimes I get into battles and actually do have a fun close battle where the teams are fairly evenly matched; these battles make me actually love playing the game, but they are often overshadowed by the frustration or boredom of one-sided battles.

Its very frustrating, I have prototype gear myself, but I shouldn't have to choose between being profitable and actually having fun. I just want to be able to get on, jump into a battle, and have some damn fun.

The new matchmaking was supposed to solve it, but it did not, and its been months since the new matchmaking has been implemented, so I really don't have faith in CCP's ability to fix it with matchmaking.

My solution would be to get rid of dropsuit tiers, and make dropsuits like vehicles in this manner. Vehicles have no tiers other than militia and standard, but instead they just have the specializations. How it should work:

Make militia gear equivalent to the current ADV basic frame dropsuits.

Standard basic frames should be the equivalent of the current PRO basic frames. The operation skills for basic frames need to give some kind of bonus to justify having 5 levels since specializations are unlocked at level 3; this bonus should also apply to all dropsuit specialization in that racial frame size.

Specialized suits (like assault or logistics) should be equivalent to the current PRO specialized suits. Skill bonus would be enough reason to keep people spending SP on the skill.

I proposed this idea before elsewhere, but the point of this thread is to express my frustration with this game right now. I just want to be able to jump into a battle, and consistently have fun. Whether its with my solution, or some something else (like gear restrictions, or WP scaling based on tier of items used), something needs to be done.

Normally I don't have to deal with the problems since I just normally AFK farm and wait for specific improvements/additions, but I don't have the time to make 600k SP (event) from just AFK farming, so I actually have to deal with playing the game .