> Honestly the saddest part is how you could have both the private servers and matchmaking almost seamlessly
Not true, having to pick a server to join by yourself out of a list was an essential part of the classic online experience and the existence of any kind of matchmaking system harms it.
Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this, originally it only had a server browser and the community felt most "alive" during this time. Then they added a basic matchmaking system that could place you on community servers, but only if they ran stock maps and settings, which heavily discouraged running any kind of modded or customized server, and significantly harmed any servers with a strong sense of community since you had random players, often fresh F2P installs that were barely distinguishable from bots, joining servers with no intention of ever playing on them more than once. Then they replaced that with the full official-only matchmaking we have today, which killed most of the remaining servers and associated communities.
I don't disagree that dedicated servers only would be better, much to the contrary, but sadly matchmaking is here to stay and there's nothing we can do about it. You can have parallel dedicated servers that have no impact at all on the matchmaking experience, that's my point, not that matchmaking would put you into community servers, seamlessly was probably the wrong word for it. I wouldn't dislike official dedicated servers being accessible by both the browser and matchmaking however.
> You can have parallel dedicated servers that have no impact at all on the matchmaking experience
No, you can't, because in any multiplayer game with microtransactions (which almost all multiplayer games released in recent years have), any servers controlled by the community would be in direct competition with the developers, which is why the option is rarely provided in the first place. If matchmaking exists, developers have an inherent motivation to lead players to it and away from any experience they don't fully control. So why would they even allow it?
Not true, having to pick a server to join by yourself out of a list was an essential part of the classic online experience and the existence of any kind of matchmaking system harms it.
Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this, originally it only had a server browser and the community felt most "alive" during this time. Then they added a basic matchmaking system that could place you on community servers, but only if they ran stock maps and settings, which heavily discouraged running any kind of modded or customized server, and significantly harmed any servers with a strong sense of community since you had random players, often fresh F2P installs that were barely distinguishable from bots, joining servers with no intention of ever playing on them more than once. Then they replaced that with the full official-only matchmaking we have today, which killed most of the remaining servers and associated communities.