You're not missing anything, that's exactly right. With sbmm you will still always face better and worse opponents, but the margins will be much more fair and the higher skill you reach, there will always be 1-2 players near your level on opposing teams. With straight cbmm there tends to be at least one player in every 1.5 games who is much higher skill than everyone else and so you get way more games with one team burying the other and single players dominating matches with 40+ kill games. You also see fireteams have a much more broken advantage in straight cbmm because they're generally playing lower tier and solo opponents. With D2 sbmm a fireteam's average skill is taken and they're matched against teams with similar averages and when matched against solo players, they're matched against players closer to the high end of the fireteam's skill bracket to balance out the team advantage. With straight cbmm, the better you get the less opponents you will see that are near your skill level as well since there are less players at the top and the game is doing nothing to put them against each other at all.

there is never pure SBMM or CBMM. Essentially its a slider and games have to figure out where they are comfortable with that slider being. In more cbmm yes it means connections are more important and lag is less of a factor. But as you never get pure CBMM there is still levelling on teams. the game will try and distribute players to either team to try and ensure as close a skill level on each as possible. So usually the teams are even roughly in terms of skill but there can be some difference in that. But with CBMM if you are not a great player its likely you will be matched with a top tier player and put against 6 decent players. Meaning the good player has to back pack his/her 5 team mates if they want to win and the weaker team mates will likely be ........ hammered. In SBMM connections are more and more pushed to the way side. Skill becomes the more important factor in matching. So you can get lobbies that are so mixed across the globe that they can be totally unplayable. Or people are in the lobbies who has a connection where it your connection goes from 40ms with everyone else to 200ms or even 500ms (yes I have had them both this season). In SBMM you tend to find people will form groups and pub stomp. People can be equal skill but once you put in coordination and communication skill doesnt really do much when you control the map and heavy non stop. So SBMM encourages people to party up and destroy people. SBMM can see people at the higher skill end have to wait for very long times between games. Weaker players will have way more lobbies as their player pool numbers are much higher and will have more protection from serious one sides games. People slightly above the average can see their connections thrown to the entire globe. I have in one game been connected to Japan, Russia, South Africa, East Coast USA and Brazil. I live in the UK. Both CBMM and SBMM have ups and downs. All depends which you value. For me I always lean to I dont mind being outplayed. I can learn from that. I can improve. I cant learn from being lagged, I cant get better from someone killing me due to lag. In no way can I get better as I dont know what kills are due to me being given a lag advantage or what deaths were due to lag also. Just a case of which do you prefer. But all heavy sbmm games usually have one thing in common. Numbers vanish quickly and the game dies. In D1 when they made the choice to shift from more cbmm to sbmm in 5 months they went from 1m players on a single weekend day to 250k a day. I dont think the SBMM is as heavy as it was then. But in the last month we have lost around a third of the crucible players. thats including the fact there has been two iron banners ongoing.

It's never about getting better. It's about performing well as I would or getting what I'm after. KD is only a reference, nothing more. People choose to define others by it all the time, I would never get LFG acceptions with my 1.24. I would use my Solo Legend Comp gain with Wish Ender of all things to vouch for my capabilities, not a number.

I just hope Bungie learned something from all this...

In America sbmm probably feels better to average players. In Europe, anything but cbmm is a total nightmare because there's no players.