Yeah agreed. I and others have made this suggestion in the past - basically to max your gear for hangar setup instead of at match start.

Honestly I think they would have if they weren't limited by their own poor design. The easy path they took i'm assuming is a simple script that increases your hangars stats to the highest possible numbers upon clicking to find a match.

The hard part is a built, standalone hangar UI that gives your mech (including implants, weapons etc.) it's maximum power before starting a match. What they're doing is a 4th squad preset in a seperate gamemode when it needs to be it's own completely different hangar system.

There should be a seperate sandbox mode

you should be able to play it with friends, 

im so annoyed that im put with idiots who are offline or die like flies, 

or you think they are normal but turns out not quite so when they approach Dreadnaught with Blockhorn and you are 100% sure they will now put shield (or else why the hell are they running 10m to a Dreadnought with revokers) but for some reason they dont, so Dreadnought shoots his ability through my ally stuns us both and kills one after the other.. omg I was fuming.

I was actually standing quite safe distance away, but unfortunately he had implants for ability range, and how could I expect my ally to be an idiot!?

True. Hangar Showdown sometimes includes these kinds of experiences, which sometimes seem fun when we're playing in a good mood, while we get furious whenever our teammates act like they were playing HS for the first time