If you look in the upper right corner it will tell you how many other players are currently looking for Pantheon matches. You'll discover that it's not many. Usually between 3 and 6. The most I've EVER seen is 9. When your pool is 3-9, it can be difficult to find 4 or 6 evenly matched players.
It generally does pretty well with what it can. For example, if 2 good players and 2 new players are looking for a game it will split the good players up rather than stacking the teams.
I think the algorithm is probably pretty good, the questionable matchmaking is simply a result of not enough players. If you want better matchmaking in Pantheon tell your friends to play Pantheon.
Remember, you can't quite compare this to automatching in other games. Nearly all games focus on 1v1 for their automatching. So even if the automatch pool is small, it's much easier to create good matches for 1v1 than 2v2 or 3v3.
I think Pantheon is doing pretty well right now. Finding a match doesn't take too long, and connections are generally fast and reliable. It might be worthwhile to let people wait a little bit longer to hold out for a better match, but that's a judgement call and a difficult balance to maintain. If it's really an issue (and i don't think it is) there could be a minimum match quality and a timeout if it can't meet that quality. Then you recieve a message "There aren't enough evenly matched players looking for a match right now. Please try again later."
It will get better as the game grows.
