Rands I have had exactly the opposite experience.

I have never waited more than a minute or two to connect to a game. When the game was first released in November the wait times were a bit longer but they released a patch that made things better.

I love the way matchmaking works. I have played upwards of 150+ games since release day and have only experienced lag in a handful of them. I appreciate the ranking system as well. While every once in a while I find a game where I totally get owned, but I am usually in a game where both sides are pretty even, I play a lot of team skirmish and team slayer. It should be noted that Bungie actually says that you shouldn't care too much about your rank, as the primary purpose of the ranking system is not for bragging rights but for balancing teams and creating games with players of similar skill levels.

The party system and xbox live's friends list makes it really easy for my friends to find me and always end up on my team.

It's too bad that you are having such bad luck with the matchmaking. It really is a great system.

Also, you need to checkout the stats on bungie.net, they are keeping stats for every game. And you can go and look at a map of the level and see where all the kills occured. I had a holy shit moment. Have a look at my blog entry from November 11th for a better description, it's still on the front page.

-Sam