To cut to the chase (followed up by being long winded), it would go a VERY long way towards providing a viable automatch system (you'll note that I do not mention team-automatch anywhere in the post) if you would re-enable skirmish mode. It would make it easier for players like myself to play more games against more people that are more fair.  And the basic version of this would not take much more work if I understand your infrastructure correctly.

Pros/Cons of Pantheon mode

Pros:

• You have a decent amount of programming in place so that stats are updated and tournaments can be held over whatever time frame you want
• You split the community up however they choose to be split - light or dark

Cons:

• Because of the added light/dark distinction, you could potentionally have ladder ranked players 1-3 on dark and ladder ranked 30,000-30,002 on light.  No appropriate balancing would take place
• It doesn't exist 100% of the time

I'm sure there are more pros/cons, but those are the 1st that come to mind.  So, onto skirmish mode:

Pros/Cons of Skirmish mode

Pros:

• The only split in the community is by ??? (I'm not sure what logic you were using before this was disabled, but let's just say you were going by rank for now).
• It automatches all of the players in the pool based on ^^
• Its a game mode that exists 100% of the time (prior to SD disabling it)

Cons:

• There are no tournaments.  Its simply a game mode that persists at all times.

I want to stress, just for a moment, as I doubt you (Frogboy) have encountered TOO much of this yet.  I might be wrong, so no offense meant.  Many good players in the community are now requesting balanced matches.  Many of us are willing to balance games.  BUT, some people do not think things are balanced well enough to launch... so they quit games, making all the people who waited for balancing, wait longer.  Then, someone with 0 games played will join.  And that makes things more imbalanced, so we kick and wait.  This goes on and on.  If we had a simple option to get balanced games going, I think I'd use that MUCH MUCH MUCH more often.  Pantheon DOES NOT provide this feature for us. 

Here's EXACTLY what I would do to provide the community with a better matchmaking alternative.  All of these steps would need to be followed EXACTLY to get alot of the community playing more balanced games, more frequently.  Re-enable skirmish mode.  Completely remove the overlay showing what players are joining the game.  Seriously - remove it COMPLETELY.  You can argue that you don't want to play with joebob, but I can argue that you'll quit the game when you see me join it and not know which team I'll be on.  Just remove the overlay screen completely from skirmish mode.  Next, create some sort of matchmaking scheme.  It could be as simple as balancing teams based on rank or total games played.  Decide whatever you think is fair.  Implement that.  And last, DROP PANTHEON.  Handle it just like you did skirmish.  I like and understand the reasoning for dropping a game mode, but I think you chose the wrong one primarily because of the light/dark distinction.

If you guys did this, I'd do nothing but play skirmish mode for the next week at least and I'm convinced many would enjoy the gaming experience FAR MORE than waiting around in a lobby.  It would also eliminate people stacking teams in pantheon AND greatly reduce people quiting games at the load screen because they don't want to play with X person or are trying to play against AI only to go up in ladder rank. 

Any chance this is something you'd be willing to do for us?