Oh I'm quite sure they know the arena is garbage, and not just the matchmaking system. It isn't designed to be good, it's designed to be enjoyable long enough for you not to quit immediately. After that, you're either invested and might start paying, or you're not and they don't care if you quit. Why do you think the great hall exists? Or the tier bonuses? Why is the arena so heavily tied into the rest of the game? They are there for one purpose and one purpose only; to force players to participate in the arena, because if not forced to, why would anyone willingly subject themselves to it?
I guess I could be wrong of course, but the claims they make does not match reality. At this point, that means that either they know exactly what they are doing and are just being malicious liars about it, or they are remarkably incompetent and have designed a system that fails on just about every point of their stated goals. You have Plarium officials that can't decide if power is a meaningless metric or the greatest thing since sliced bread. The matchmaking system isn't fair. The arena in general isn't fair. The arena isn't a competitive environment, or at least not one that is in any way healthy or feasible. None of that would be a cause for concern, if it didn't also inherently gatekeep players.
But it doesn't matter, because they won't listen. Either they won't because they don't care, or they won't because they are simply that dumb. We'll get the same copy/paste PR answer about how the arena is great, how you should just watch content creator videos (on how to beat those same content creators that also have years of grinding and/or paying to back them up, because obviously that makes total sense), and throughout it all they will completely miss/dodge the point on why the arena is broken, because forever and always and regardless of what you say, in their minds you'll inevitable be reduced to someone who just complains because they need to "git gud".
