The CoH2.org only ladders smacked of amateurism, and the lack of lobbies obtuse and even stubborn.
CoH2 isn't fun to play as a community game where you can meet new players *in-game*
^ This.
The online - or lack of - in game communication with RANDOM PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW - has essentially killed the in game community. My COH 1 in games friend list was huge, you'd often converse with players while waiting for a 4th player to join a public match etc and you'd build a network of friends.
The current system is sterile and cold - COH1 I never made friends playing Automatch - that wasn't what its purpose was for - Automatch was where you went to compete - the Lobby's were where you went to play and enjoy the game.
Now all we have is a single avenue to play the game - a forced avenue I might add.
Personally I'm glad you had the open Beta as it enabled me to save a good chunk of change and cancel my preorder - the game at that time felt very rough and I figured it'd take several months of patches to fix - so I thought I'd save myself the premium price for being asked to be a tester Guinea Pig and come back when it was fixed. The lack of public lobbies at that time I thought was simply because the beta was there to test the actual game mechanics.
In hind sight.....wow.....its really hard to believe you guys thought that beta was essentially good to go.