Yeah the whole thing is a sham. Their are tons of games out there with far better ranked systems. For instance, any halo game or call of duty game, rocket league (the list goes on) but the idea isn't to create better players. The idea is to keep the popular players, popular. If new players were able to pop up and contest the popular professional players constantly than they would not be able to market them properly.
The idea that league is a special game (when compared to other games) where only a select few people in the world are capable of playing well is absurd beyond all measure. You mean to tell me that out of roughly 800k ranked players only 500 of them are considered good enough at the game? Really?
The solution is simple. Get rid of mmr completely and add another bracket. Then just place people purely based on there rank. If your b5 then you play with other b5's; keep your lp system the same but only base it on win loss.
The idea that the creators of the game have any real idea about what wins games is silly. They hand our mmr like candy for assists like its not hard to grab a wu-kong and go 2/10/30 and completely throw the game for your team. These guys at riot aren't good league players. There cs nerds who think that they know how to play the game because they were involved in its creation. Which is an absolutely preposterous notion. That's like assuming Josh McDaniels should be able to strap on pads and go take care of everything for Mr. Brady.
Also give us a solo queue please. Give us a queue where we will never, ever, see two people queuing together. Letting people team up and play with people who aren't on teams is... well.. dumb.