I don’t know of anywhere that Blizzard stated that QP is evenly matched teams.
On the contrary, I have seen Blizzard state that Quick Play was designed with the purpose to create games quickly.
A lot has changed over the years and some of it has become controversial, but originally there was no QP mode or Competitive mode, there was one mode to play the game.
The devs always intended on making a competitive mode, but they hadn’t made it by the time the game launched.
When they made the only mode available into a Competitive mode, which kept track of player rank and matched players up of relatively even skill level, they also decided to make “Quick Play”. A mode that was pitched as being casual that players could literally jump in and out of games as they pleased (that’s right, it was even pitched as you could just leave the game… years before leaver penalties were even considered).
Quickplay had one main priority. Make games fast. It did not need to look for evenly skilled players, that’s what comp was for and that would only slow down the process for QP.
It became even more important once Role Queue was added as this increased the queue time for both Comp and QP. Even before trying to find evenly skilled players, RQ unfortunately slowed down the system’s ability to create games as quickly as before.
Now, it’s true that QP does take into account a players MMR. A skill ranking that is hidden from the players. It is highly worth noting that this barely does anything at all for multiple reasons. One, speed of game creation is still top priority, even over evenly matched players and teams. The system may try to find evenly skilled players to put on teams, but if it can’t, it will take the closest it can find… which may not be that close.
It also has to work around the fact that a GM player can group up with their Bronze friend and play QP together on the same team, in which case the system has to try and figure that out as best as it can and again… it’s still trying to create the game as quick as possible, as that is it’s priority.
If it can’t find another GM player to put on the opposing team, it then has to try and “make up for it” by adding the “equivalent” to a GM player and put it on the opposing team and possibly adding more low rank players to the team that has a GM on it.
The point is, it’s essentially an impossible task, but the point is that QP was originally not supposed to be anything but casual. Throughout all of OW1, no one complained that QP wasn’t evenly matched teams.
It was essentially unanimously known that QP was where you went to goof off, to try a character you never played before, to try really wonky comps to see if it worked (and sometimes, it was how new, fresh comps were added to the competitive scene), it was for new players to get the concept down.
If you wanted an actual game, you simply went and played comp. No one whined about QP being too casual.
OW2 launched and brought in a lot of brand new players.
The only thing available to play at launch was QP. Comp was not playable at launch.
So everyone played QP and got used to the game if you were brand new or got used to the new concept of 5v5 and the major changes that came with it.
After a little bit, since there was no Comp mode, some players started playing it pretty sweaty to make up for there not being a comp mode.
Comp was introduced.
Players started shifting over to Comp. Some players (mostly new players) did not care for it for various reasons (they didn’t like their low rank or they didn’t like that players generally took this mode way more serious and that some players could be more toxic in Comp, etc.).
So they went back to QP, but they still wanted games that felt pretty serious, just not as serious as Comp, but players would leave games at any given point, making it difficult to play the casual mode in any serious way.
This created a very weird scenario and a divide.
You have players that treated QP the same way they always treated QP for years, since OW1. It was a very casual mode.
So casual, that by design it could not be taken that serious, even if you wanted to. The match making was so loose that you rarely got evenly matched teams.
You didn’t even play full games on Escort and Hybrid maps.
Brand new players were running around in QP games.
And of course, the entire concept that there was already a mode for more competitive games.
The devs decided to try and solve the problem. They changed the name of Quick Play to “Unranked” to try and give it a “it’s more casual than Ranked, but not completely casual, despite of how the mode is designed”.
They also added leaver penalties.
IMO, this was a mistake as it didn’t actually change the mode from being less casual in any way (in order to actually make it less casual, you would have to have better match making, meaning longer queue times, which would upset the players, who would stop playing the game, and Blizzard loses players/money, so that isn’t going to happen, as well as need to have full games for every map mode and at this point, your basically creating another Competitive mode where players just can’t see their rank for some reason and congratulations, you now have two competitive modes for some reason and no casual mode).
It’s also a mistake because it just gave the players who wanted to make QP into “Ranked Lite” a feeling that QP is more serious than it’s nature and now there is an argument about it daily, despite that COMP EXISTS. GO PLAY COMP.
If you don’t like how loose the match making is in QP, that’s because it’s loose by design!
But luckily for you, there is another mode that has much tighter match making. You don’t have to complain about a mode being too loose when you have literally the option available that you are asking for. GO. PLAY. COMP.
(kinda joking, but sadly not)