Lament of an ambitious silver player

I would like to express my in depth disappointment and why I am about to stop playing one of the best games out there. Last month I was a silver 4 trying to rank up to get gold before the season ended, for the Victorious Sivir skin since I am an adc main. I found myself a duo partner and we clicked pretty well. We started spamming ranked, destroying bot lane and carrying (occasionally getting carried) and in about a week we went from silver 4 to silver 1. I was pretty excited since I had about a week and a half to get gold from silver 1 which seemed very achievable. Suddenly last week, we started playing against some surprisingly good teams. My friend made a conjecture that people are probably smurfing to get gold for their friends. This didn't seem that bad until I realized that me and my duo partner were at an inherent disadvantage; we could only get 3 possible smurfs on our team whereas the other team could have up to 5. Now the games became a battle of who could get more smurfs on their team instead of me and my friend using "skill" or "patience" or "teamwork" or anything else to get to gold. Since we were duoing, we inherently got put on blue side 95% of our games (i.e. we lose LP than we gain and we get lower mmr teammates because blue side supposedly has a higher win rate?). In less than two days, my friend and I fell from silver 1 to almost silver 5. Either the players in our bracket suddenly became a lot better or we became a lot worse. It saddens my heart that all our effort was in vayne (haha get it? because most smurfs play vayne) because at the end of the day people who paid to get elo boosted or had their friends play their account got rewarded instead of players who actually worked for their goal. This was not meant to be a rant but an expression of feelings, so I apologize if it felt that way =)