I've been playing much more online lately. I think the matchmaking is probably the best in the industry, I always hated playing online because it feels like everybody is an asshole. But once you get to DR/SR level A it becomes very clean races. Hopefully I'll be S eventually. It's taking a while cause I suck.
The combination of DR, SR, and qualifying works well enough. I only wish for some improvement to the penalty computation, which is impossible to get perfect, I guess. Usually a big accident on the first turn is a penalty for everybody because of the chaos, which is very frustrating when you're in pole and get rammed into the wall, then hit someone that just crashed in front. But again I stopped suffering this after levelling my SR and DR. People simply don't crash often anymore.