It feels awful to try to sync casuals with friends, have one person get passed up on the pop, and have to decide between leaving them behind to wait for anywhere from 2-30min ...or having everyone eat a DF strike to attempt a re-sync. It's casual! It's just for fun! I believe the positives of letting friends play together outweigh the negatives; there are plenty of people out there who won't play PvP alone and wouldn't queue up otherwise. A little imbalance is OK, so long as there's a place players can go to play (presumably lol) balanced games. Even better, if dissatisfaction with premade teams pushes more people to queue ranked.

I can understand excluding premades from ranked. Matchmaking is already straining against the low player population and it would break completely if top players could stack together. We don't have the population to sustain team ranked queue, though it'd be nice if we did someday. It's better for everyone if we can get more people playing PvP in one form or another.

I also think it could also be beneficial to allow undersized/imbalanced private CC matches. If 4 friends want to play 2v2 CC together, they should be able to! Moreover, it would open CC maps to exploration and gpose. It's a little silly that there's no way to familiarize yourself with map mechanics outside of a live game.