You know what really irks me that I finally realized recently. MM forces everyone, even custom made lobbies into scramble. The moment you hit recruit from queue, you get scrambled.
So the solution...a friend of mine and I would constantly swap sides or make new lobbies over and over. Making new lobbies worked best as we could pick the map we wanted to fly on every time and weren't at the mercy of others. If ships rage quit, which they commonly did, then we'd swap and remain in the lobby but otherwise we'd drop and make a new lobby then fill from queue.
Sometimes you have to sit there a bit and a CA one day implied not to because it was spreading an already thin population across multiple lobbies so that none of the lobbies would start full. Frankly, don't care. Muse can just fix matchmaking or bring back the lobby list. Heck if CAs get a list then lets all apply for CA status and then we won't complain anymore.