Battlefield 3 Squads Broke

Now that I have a dozen hours of online play in Battlefield 3, I want to write some thoughts about it. The short version: The game is awesome, but online play is seriously hampered by some bad flaws.

While online play is extremely fun and well-balanced, if you want to play with a bunch of friends, it is infuriating to no end -- I know because I keep trying to play with my buddies and we cannot get our squad on the same server and on the same squad.

The problems that I have observed are:

• Battlefield 3 does not understand the concept of a full squad. If a squad of four tries to join a server that is near full, but still has enough room it will get split if someone gets inserted before the squad does. So, if you look for a 24-player server that currently has 18-players, a four person squad would fit there. But, if three players join at the same time as when the four person squad does, BF3 doesn't tell the squad of four that the server is full. Instead, BF3 will let three people on the squad of four into the game. The leftover person is kicked back to menus.
• Battlefield 3 gives priority to balanced teams over intact squads. If a squad of four tries to join a game that has 12 people, but is uneven (say five vs seven because of people leaving the game), then BF3 will split up the squad of four! It will put three on the team of five and one on the team of seven -- therefore making the teams balanced at eight players each, but leaving the squad broken.
• VOIP chat on the PS3 platform is horribly broken. Not only can we not hear each other talking because the volume is so low, but it becomes choppy after a while. So, no one can understand what each other are saying.