Why not play custom games until pantheon is fixed?  It's like you keep eating the rottenberry pie and crying when you've got cherry cheesecake right next to you, just wanting to be eaten.  I'm giving you the spoon, go ahead.

Indeed. Putting AI in the Pantheon where the AI is obviously not up to the tast is just stupid. Then again, maybe they're just doing it to compensate for their shitty networking, where 3v3 Human pantheon matches are virtually unheard of, since someone always drops and fucks it up for everyone.

cut them some slack mate~ use gameranger instead it works fine until the official servers go on this week

I think pantheon is the equiv of ranked - i dont think custom games add to your rank.

Err, no, I'm pretty sure at this point every single game, even with the other DGs being 100% AI, add to your "rank" (or equivalent thereof in DG). My player sheet in the Pantheon webpage is not empty, even though I have never played Pantheon.

Keep in mind, however, that the ranking system is soon going to be reset anyway after the devs have established what games they would like to have contribute to rankings and what they would like to have not contribute to them.

(They said that they would like only Pantheon games to contribute to rank, as you have assumed. However, I think this is a big mistake unless they make some major changes to Pantheon.)