The thing is that if a player can focus on playing a single faction rather than having to be capable of playing both, the level at which they play their favored faction will be more refined than if they had to play both of them, ultimately resulting in better matches.
He knows more about the faction but less about the game. Without having approached it from both sides he's not as good of a player and understands less about the game as a whole. My experience with mirrors (that do not include SC) is that specialists are never the best overall players, and watching a game between two specialists is never as interesting as it is between two players who know the game as a whole.
You're confusing potential balance issues with potential design issues here. Mirror matches are balanced by default. The issue is really to make the mirror matches interesting, but that's a question of design.
The issue from a balance perspective is really to make all the asymmetrical matchups balanced.
The point is with just 4 matchups OF was never even closed to balanced. Make that 8 and you get the idea. If you're saying you can just completely ignore mirrors when it comes to balancing the game, then in my opinion you've already admitted mirrors are inferior. There needs to be a healthy variety of viable strategies in a mirror, and making that happen while also balancing 2 other matchups would be quite difficult.
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