The CoH2 approach is vastly superior given the size of the community.
I disagree since i prefer waiting some more minutes over getting matched with a random mate vs an arranged team. For the random team this is nothing but frustrating because you will most likely get stomped while a cheap victory is simply boring for the AT team. I have seen this problem from both perspectives and this made me stop playing any mode involving more than 2 players.
Just by the way, I never had any problem finding a 2v2 AT or 2v2 random game in CoH 1 and i played thousands of hours. I quit playing a few months ago because of the boring sniper spam meta game and the rising amount of bar counting players which lead to a CoH2 like situation in CoH1.