This game is pretty much putting the nail on the coffin of the franchise. It wasn't even close to being release ready and a lot of the decisions they made (no squading up outside of servers) were truly terrible.
Even more frustrating is a complete lack of acknowledgement from DICE that the problems exist. All they do is promise "we have some fixes in the works." Every other developer seems quick to acknowledge issues and communicate what fixes are coming. COD Ghosts released with major issues with spawning and they've not only acknowledged the issue, but put out several fixes and said that there are some more fine tuning coming. With DICE you never know if a problem is even being worked on. It could be fixed in a few weeks, or it might never even be addressed. That's infuriating.
I want to like the game. I see the potential for what it could be. But at this point it seems unlikely that they'll ever get it to that point.
Dice has been communicating via their blog. They've been posting in Reddit in the various Battlefield specific subreddits (at least, their devs have been, not sure if they would be considered official responses).
Not excusing the broken state, or how long it's been taking to patch, but they haven't been silent about it. And it has been getting better.
Not sure about the "squad up" ahead of time, that must be a console thing, can you not select a server to join? Was this something that has been in previous BF games, and removed from this one?