the free bar in coh1 was awful, don't bring it back. getting a free officer unit is already enough of a boost.
You dont seem to have a deeper understanding how CoH1 works. The BAR upgrade was part of the US tech tree and worth 200 manpower and 60 fuel. That's hardly free. This was well balanced and for sure not awful.
MGs seem to suppress in the first burst 90% of the time. well placed mg42s completely shuts down infantry heavy builds such as con spam, and in the case of the USF, every build since all they can do is make rifles.
Sounds nice so you finally have to out flank to win.
Searching for an automatch game with a custom skinpack (probably hundreds of megabytes (MB)) would force your opponent(s) to download the skinpack.
Depends on the implementation. In CoH1 you could make use of custom skin packs (not just for vehicle like in CoH2 but for all map objects) in automatch. From the players perspektive all units and objects used custom skins but from the opponents point of view nothing chanced, he still saw the default skins. It was a client based solution. I hoped something like this would be added with this patch to CoH2. Sadly this isn´t the case.