To me ranked isnt about winning though. This means when i am disadvantaged I take it like a test to move up in mmr because all i am doing is trying to improve. Back when i really started playing this game i was at like 1000 mmr in arams. It took me more than 200 games to get to 1300ish even though I thought I was much better; in fact i knew i was better. Whenever i got into that 1500 match I felt so excited cuz i had finally made it and i was improving. Usually right after that 1500 match i would drop right back to 1300 and it was super annoying because i would win 2 out of 3 at 1500. After many games I now sit at 1700-1900 easily and cherish when i get to play with a diamond (even if they arent tryharding). I still think that the 1300 mmr games were the hardest games i had to play if I had to rise again from 1000. For the most part aram matchmaking is similar to ranked matchmaking and my main point is that ranked should be about trying to IMPROVE, not WIN. If you have this viewpoint then only the long term matters cuz it will take a long time to improve and, as a result, you will never get caught up with "disadvantaged" teams because you won't see them as disadvantaged. In some of my aram games my 1300 teams were better than the 1600 enemy team we played against. The higher in arams i got the less i cared about mmr differences since I started to realize that every game was winnable even when most of my arams, and the chances of winning them, were based on team comps and not as much on skill anymore. I started to not even pay attention to the kills ratio between teams either because, like the rift, the game can be decided in a moment and throwing happens every 2 minutes. Again, I started to not care about mmr because every game became winnable no matter how bad the game's start went. I am now applying this to normals and I have seen my mmr steadily rise.
In regards to your duo q point i actually think that duo-q makes ranked harder unless both of the players doing it are above (in mmr) where they are (in rank) since riot takes this into account in matchmaking and places them against tougher opponents or other duo q's.
One account I looked at that i found interesting was one with the name: future doctor. He started ranked not too long ago and started at 1270ish and in 4 days got to gold 1 100 lp when i last checked. In his first game he played with people around 1270 but his second game he played against high silvers, the next he played high silvers and some golds, his third and fourth games were against many low golds and this was all when he just got placed at around 1270 which is around silver 4. By the time he got to the next rank he was playing with people in gold. This is NOT imbalance in matchmaking for either team as noted by his continuous rise all the way to gold 1.
