Profile of Inverse

Again, that has literally nothing to do with it. Why would files sitting on your hard drive affect how the game itself runs? Those files aren't doing anything, they aren't being loaded, they're just sitting there. They shouldn't affect anything because they're not doing anything, and if they do affect something, it's because there's some seriously fucked up code running that's accessing those files or the directory in an extremely inefficient way. Again, that shouldn't be expected.

The only thing the game is doing with that directory is writing a temporary replay file. If writing that file with a large volume of other files in the directory is causing a noticeable reduction in performance, somebody at Relic made a pretty basic mistake. Something like that should never, ever, ever affect performance.

That's not how it works though, because when you give people that option you segment your automatch pool and it just turns into the CoH1 situation all over again. Sure, maybe they could do it for 2v2s and still have decent match times, but if you let people make that choice for 3v3s and 4v4s it'll kill automatch. What do you think the chances are of two full 4v4 teams of similar skill queuing at the same time? With CoH2's tiny player numbers it's essentially zero. And how many people are going to solo queue and say they're fine playing against a team of 4? Also going to be essentially zero. It's no different than explicitly creating separate AT and random queues.

Dota 2 used to have two separate queues: one for solo players, and one for parties and solo players who didn't mind playing against parties. When they added ranked matchmaking, they removed the solo queue because they were afraid further segmentation would increase wait times beyond what they consider to be acceptable amounts. This is a game that easily has 500,000 players online at any one time, and even then they were worried about segmenting their matchmaking too much. CoH2 has 1% of those player numbers. The current system, while not ideal, is absolutely the best possible solution given the game's player situation.

The alternative is waiting 20+ minutes for a game. Most people would tell you that's unacceptable.

You wouldn't have this opinion if you ever tried to play team games in CoH1. CoH1 had separate queues for random and arranged teams, and it was largely terrible. 2v2 and 2v2AT were kinda okay, but even then it was very hard to find AT games during off hours, and 3v3/4v4 random and AT queues were entirely unused because it was impossible to find games in a timely manner. The CoH2 approach is vastly superior given the size of the community.

Using a small-scale beta to test balance changes is a pointless endeavour because in all but the most extreme situations, a small group of players isn't going to generate the volume of games necessary to draw any sort of meaningful conclusions. I can't think of another game that uses such an approach; SC2 has the PTR, which is available to everyone, Dota 2 never publically tests balance changes, only new heroes, and then only for buxfixing and not for balancing, and CSGO has no beta stream at all.

It's an entirely pointless thing to do, the only benefit being giving the community the impression that you're canvasing their opinions prior to release.

Everything they "announced" was already at least suspected thanks to what they put in strings in the last patch, but it's nice to hear that they're at least aware of some of the major issues like optimization. From the roadmap image...

New faction: Brit strings in patch
Optimization: Everyone knows performance is shit, but it's nice to know Relic agrees
Balance-focused support: Not really an announcement of anything
In-game store: Kind of an announcement, but still there's been talk of this since release and many of the strings in the last patch strongly suggested it
Better mod tools: Relic's been talking about this since mod tools were released, though user-created skins and "asset packs" are kind of announcements since the strings only hinted at user-created decals
User content and modding competitions: Something new that they never talked about, though you could've guessed based on their shift to user-generated content with all the strings about curation
Improved docs/resources: Again been talked about since mod tools were released
Leaderboards: Been talked about since the leaderboards here were created
ESL: Not exactly news since they didn't provide any specifics

In the end, talk is cheap, and this whole thing could very easily backfire if they take ages to deliver on some of these items. But the community seems more concerned with communication than actual content, so they're giving people communication. It's a little worrisome that the recent patch didn't provide anything to make the non-CoH2 player excited about picking up the game again, but maybe that'll change in the future. Or maybe Relic's happy with their player numbers right now and is more interested in maintaining rather than taking risks in the hopes of gaining more players. It's really impossible to know.

pretty sure they're working with UGC, not ESL, as UGC is listed on the road map and ESL is not. huge difference between the two.

UGC is user-generated content. It's not a league or a tournament. UGC curation literally means taking user-generated content on the workshop and incorporating it into the actual game. User-generated content has nothing to do with ESL, which was also shown on the timeline image.