I don't know if you're including me in the "bashers" (and no need to justify it, I'm just going to put my thoughts out there;) all I know is that I liked the servers before the patch and I don't like what's happened to them now.
I believe I read that you said people joining and getting kicked immediately isn't a problem with H2 Shark, but with them having the wrong PCID or something like that. That may be true, I really don't recall it happening until the patch happened, but I have no evidence or anything. All I know is that when the patch first came out, I tried to join the servers without it and got booted immediately, much like people still seem to. What happens if someone joins without the patch? They get booted immediately, right?
Plenty of times I will be in a 2-person FFA and upwards of 5 people will join and get kicked immediately while I'm playing with that one other person. It really is annoying when I could be having a decent 6-man FFA (still not great, but better than 1v1) and instead I have a 1v1.
Regardless, I don't mean to bash; I just do not think that limiting the population by forcing people to download an external program (which, despite your ostensibly good intentions, is worrisome for many people-- downloading a third-party patch for a game can often have bad consequence), or having the majority of the servers be matchmaking-esque and locking the server are good ideas, but I appreciate that you give us a few social FFA servers. Again, I liked your servers, and I still prefer the social FFAs to 16-man BR/sniper FFA on Foundation. I prefer MLG gametypes and you guys have the most active MLG servers, but I think there have been some poor decisions along the way.