@The Salamander King I'm surprised somewhat, but definitely glad to hear your reaction to the patch as well. A bit of a different perspective to a point due to your focus on the comp metas, but there's definitely a lot of crossover on our specific takes on the balancing. As I was reading the notes I had in mind a lot of the points and topics you've raised, and noticed basically none of them were mentioned once.
Season Derank:
Ahh yeah, the "new season" really kicked in last night, with the new weps and deranks and all. It only dropped me to A+. Not sure if all S's only got dropped to A+, or if it treated me as an honorary S+ because I was past the marker for the rank-up battle. I'll have to check the other account which was one series back from rank-up when I last left it.
I'm not sure when (or if) I'll do the A+ to S rank up again with the new points losses. It was brutal last time, and knowing that all the lousy players I've been playing with are now in A+ with me for the rank up doesn't fill me with much confidence. :P Unless only the S+'s and anyone in the rank-up line got pushed to A+ in which case maybe now's the best time to get
good passable teams.
New Weps:
I'm not sure how I feel about the new weps. I did expect stringers and splatanas. I love stringers, I don't love the splatanas that much. But they seemed ripe for something new. IDK much about the new shooter, I don't play shooters other than sploosh really. The new roller....I.....I don't hate it....it's kind of fun....but.....I don't get the point of it. It's a wide, slow roller that doesn't ink as well as dynamo, isn't as fast as any other roller, and doesn't have an ohko at all making it...really dangerous. I had fun playing with it, but I don't get its actual role or why you'd use it over fingza or dynamo, really. I'll have to use it some more, but I don't have a feel for why it exists or what it does well that other rollers don't do better.
The new charger...I'm also mixed on. I don't hate it necessarily. I went back and forth between it and squiffer, and i think I had a better k/d with the new one than squiffer (though I did unusually bad on squiffer), But in alot of ways it feels like a slower bamboozler with a forced delay. I have to spend more time with it ,I kinda like it in some ways, but I'm not sure that it's not just a worse bamboozler with a much higher liability in delays and slow kills.
The big win for me is the carbon deco returning though. It really is nice to have the old carbon back. The sploosh may take a back seat to carbon deco again, because that thing remains devastating, now with range!
New maps: Didn't get to see flounder, but the other one....it's not bad, definitely, spawn is protected well, there's flank routes. But it's pretty small with basically a ramp and mid and that's it. Is Mahi the template for all maps or something? I'm starting to miss Moray...
Player population:
Yeah, Splatoon 3 sells ok. But who is it selling to and who is playing what? There's the people that buy it for the single player and just playing TW. Keep in mind that's probably the majority of sales right there. There's people that casually play periodically and not too often, or only splatfest. There's the people that play only TW. The people that play mostly salmon, or local multiplayer, or open anarchy, or table turf. How big is the non-japan player pool that actually plays regularly, in the competitive modes, in a specific rank tier with a specific mmr range, on a particlar rotation/time of day in a particular matchmaking priority geography? And how many of those are specifically S/low S+ rank? I think there's something of a bubble. Even if you remove salmon and turf and offline and occasional casual players, and look only at those playing anarchy series, you'll find a huge cluster in the C's and B's, maybe into the A's, you'll find the super hardcore enthusiast/comp squids in the high S+'s. I don't think there's going to be that large a pool in the S's/low S+'s. at any time. We're talking specifically about regular players at a specific time of day and geographic matchmaking locale, playing specifically anarchy series, specifically in the S/low S+ ranks with similar MMRs. If we're talking more than 500 people I'd be utterly shocked. Call of Duty? A million easy. S3? A few hundred is optimistic for those narrow requirements, and we're looking at 8 at a time, so in 62 matches or 12 hours of play you'll have met all of them. And there are a large percentage of Japanese players pulled in. I've seen lobbies in rank-up battles where 3/4 opponents and 1 or 2 teammates are Japan. Basically it just dropped me and one or two other players in a Japanese lobby for the battle. And for wait times I've had a number of occasions where it makes me wait 3 minutes or so for a match , obviously it has one SPECIFIC lobby in mind it wants me in and will make me wait for it. Sometimes when it does that it drops with a "not enough players please try again" error.
IDK what it is about my mmr that matches me like this, but it did it in S1, too. The system wasn't as miserable, and it took the KO vs non-KO wins, and the relative skill vs opponent skill into account and S3 does neither, so this takes and old problem and applies worse effects to it.
Would we really know from datamining if the server side of the matchmaking was selecting team makeups to rig which side wins? I'm not sure anything client-side would be involved in that. If it's not rigged, then again, it's broken on a scale that it literally just doesn't work right. We're not talking slight imbalances, we're talking teams that are repeatedly shredded without killing anyone. Surely the system knows well enough they can't hit the broad side of a barn, unless it's just been giving them easy matches by luck?
It's obvious why they won't let you intentionally derank: Trolls/griefers would just smurf it, deranking over and over again to spawncamp low ranks (and use the wins to grind chunks.) But I still don't get the whole never-deranking thing. At first I wand to say I'm glad they don't have natural deranking because I'd be too afraid to lose rank to play...but...so far....I still have yet to go negative meaning I would not at any time so far have ever deranked. Its mostly just the endless cycle of grinding to rank-ups then being shot back down (which will be worse after this patch.) And the rank ups are definitely just plain bad. I do wish they'd get rid of them. The whole idea is bad. Recalling the A+ to S on the alt it was PAINFUL getting past that rank-up, yet then smooth sailing in the normal rank battles. Instead of testing if you're equal to the next rank it tests if you can solo a lobby of the next rank, which of course nobody can, so then it depends on lucking through. It just makes no sense.
Matchmaking:
Hah, I wouldn't doubt my copy is cursed. And FWIW, there are certainly discussions out there about the same exact thing, especially concerning the rank up battles, and especially concerning the S+ rank up battles. A huge part of the problem with the S+ is that even if they stick with 2+2 SSS+S+, there's a massive difference in skill between S+0 and S+50. I'm easily an S+0, I'm nowhere close to an S+50. But I don't think the matchmaking sees the difference, it just sees "ok, 4-5 S+'s here!" It would be like throwing S's into a B- rank-up battle. Or even S+0's.
It's not only the rank up battles that go like this, but it's at its most extreme there, in part because I'm sure it's not discriminating between S+0 and S+50 rivals. (But then why are they always on the other team? And why was that A+ rank up match my S lobby was thrown into given a super player on my team only for that match?)
We don't know exactly how the matchmaker does what it does, but I don't necessarily disagree that it does not affect all players the same. Whatever it does, it clearly seems to have a certain effect on a certain type of player. And I definitely do not believe that's new for S3. The same problem, but less extreme happened in S1. Back then it just used Elo so it didn't even have consistency offsets etc. I didn't really do much S2 ranked at all, so I don't know if it was better or worse, but in S3 it's right back to the S1 problem, cranked to 11.
Pure speculation, but considering the majority of the time I'm the dominant splatter with few deaths, my assumption is I'm categorized as a sort of hunter-killer player in the algorithm. Which isn't necessarily inaccurate. But it's also a low quality picture of play out of context. It ends up assigning me more times than not as a sort of team guardian intended to protect a team of weaker players from harm by removing opponents. That of course ignores that it should be trying to create teams of equal players, not trying to create "equal" teams based on one player being the dominant protector and it absolutely positively does not do that. It also ignores that, while that player type may be true, it's not the ONLY play style I engage in, I just do what needs doing based on the situation and what my current weapon excels at. And it also ignores that a "hunter killer" player may be able to best multiple opponents at once of lower skill than themselves, can not do so against opponents of equal or better skill than themselves, leading to perpetually being assigned matches in which you're the leader of a bunch of weaker teammates against an team of players equal or above your own skill level. I may be "better" than 2 or 3 members of the other team, but if one of them is equal or better than myself, trying to 1v2, 1v3 continuously starts falling apart. I don't think the matchmaker understands this concept, thus keeps throwing me (and others with similar ratings) into the same bad matches over and over where if you can not 1v3 the enemy team on a continual basis you lose.
I've also noticed if I get a good team where everyone is pretty equal, and we win one or two, and it feels really good, it will then slot out one or two of those players and replace them with much weaker players, specifically making sure to pair me with weaker players.
What stands out the most is that I'd say 90% of matches where we LOSE, I'm the most dominant (usually by far) player on my team. Usually a combination of the best score pusher, the top overall splatter, top enemy splatter, top inker, almost always lowest deaths, often the only one not negative, etc, or if splooshing often even trade k/d or negative by one where everyone else is deep negative, and my sploosh deaths often happen because I was the only one left alive while in deep enemy territory, so 1v4 with no ink and no range. When we WIN, I'm generally not the most dominant in all areas, k/d of 3 or all 4 players is pretty much similar in line with weapon choice. Nobody really stands out as dominant at all. If we go a few games with the same team, sometimes I'm top, sometimes I'm not. We keep winning. Very even. As it should be. But that's a rare treat.
. You know, I messed with thermal on elite a while and decided it's useless. I may have to try it! 
. I'm playing it like a manic carbon. I do love carbon deco but I may end up playing wide more after all for one reason: "controller role". Lack of turf is one of the biggest ranked problems and carbon isn't great at controlling it. The wide can do wonders. It's definitely grown on me though it's hard to land those thin vertical flicks. The ohko is weird. It's basically sploosh range. I'm finding it can often be better to go for a horizontal follow-ups to 2hko vertical, almost like carbon burst bomb follow up. Also discovered it's not too hard to do a close range horizontal and follow up with rolling/crushing for fast kill. 
