Ratcheting ranking system makes for an utterly miserable experience

[Loggos]

I agree, as another person whose native language is not English I initially read "ratcheting" competely differently. I primarily know ratchet as a demeaning slang term, so "ratcheting" read like an adjective à la "this godforsaken match making". It didn't help either that OP's initial elaboration of the problem in their first post was very sparse.

They didn't directly say "not being able to demote is a problem" which might have made the metaphor with the tool, that is a ratchet, much more intuitive. They just said having bad people in plat, whose statistics are significantly lower than those of their team mates, ruins the experience. And that a ranking system that doesn't even remotely reflect the actual skill is useless.

But a system that better reflects people's skills can be approached from various angles so "bad people in plat, system bad" doesn't exclusively and inherently translate into "my particular problem is the fact that people can't demote before diamond, anti-demotion protections should go completely, no exceptions".

Removing the anti-demotion system from plat and below is one way. But you could also think in other directons, so reading the initial post you can at best guess what OP actually had in mind in terms of solutions.
Alternative readings could entail:

• Giving points/stars for individual performances such as good KDA numbers instead of just wins.
• Having more finetuned match-making that's not just based on ranks but in addition puts together teams (and enemy teams) with similar statistics (e.g., by calculating an ongoing average across your past X matches).
• Lowering the threshold for non-demotable ranks (as in making gold 4 the last rank from which you can't be demoted).

(I'm not saying those are good/bad ideas. Just that they are possible interpretations of the statement "system bad, doesn't reflect skill, pls fix".)

So throwing your vaguely phrased frustration out there and then complaining that an (international) forum doesn't immediately get your rather specific metaphor comes off as a little insincere. Neither does it lead to helpful and productive discussions.

(Thanks to the other people in this thread who explained the meaning of ratchet in this context.)