You did a great job in explaining your idea, but there are some flaws in your reasoning.
Except it doesnt. This is your major flaw in your suggestion. Quick play match making is ranked match making without looking for a rating by making the matches. As result all the games are pretty much unbalanced. Thus quick play is pretty useless in its current state for whatever game mode. I already made a thread about this when the quick play was just out. Have a look at that thread: How to make Quick Play useful?.
In general a lot needs to be changed to make quick play useful for any game. I dont really know what needs to be changed. I consider two options:
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Add a rating to quick play. But then what is really the difference betwene ranked and quick play? For RM and EW it will be the victory conditions only. In ranked it is victory, in QP it is standard. It doesnt really make much sense to me to have two separate queues for almost the same settings, but both have different names. For quickly getting into a game it is also the best to have just one queue, instead of two queues. So i am pretty convinced this isnt the solution for quick play in general.
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Remove quick play fully. I personally would think this is the best option. If it is really about the money, they could save some money by removing quick play. They can use this money to put DM back in ranked. I think that is the place it belongs. In the mean time they also can invest in the lobby. I dont really like the lobby browser. It looks so unclear and some features of Voobly are still missing.
About FFA: I am not reall ysure how popular this mode really is. A quick search on aoe2.net gives me the impression it isnt. I found 1 open lobby with FFA in the name (I have no idee how you will find these lobbies otherwise). When looking for ongoing games, i also found just 1 game only. That looks like FFA isnt that great. I dont think it will have enough players so a queue will work. It looks pretty much a niche to me based on this stats.