Just letting you know that the industry average for games 7 days into their lifecycle is roughly 6 percent. At least for mobile.
I don’t see how your solution actually does anything to solve the problem you’ve perceived. You’re still going to queue for pvp games in a balanced setting, which will inherently be seen as competitive in nature. It’s not particularly keeping people who play the game that is the issue but actually on-boarding them in the first place. It’s why you’re seeing many people hanging about (in discord) who haven’t even played the game.
An unranked matchmaker would be a pit people would never escape from, as not gaining rating would never eventually force them out of the top of the skill ceiling. Thus allowing people (smurfs too) to endlessly farm new players, which isn’t good. I don’t think isolating a segment of the player base away is good either, you need a plan to convert players eventually.
I don’t see how the slim chance you’ll get an ai game translates into converting pve players to pvp players. Around 500 rating is the highest populated skill bracket. Assuming any percentage of pve players join the system, one would never get to play vs ai in the first place.
You would need to prove that toxicity correlates into a drastic loss of retention. Right now it just looks like a way to attack other people from a position of moral superiority. I urge you to try a popular mutiplayer game like COD and see how that goes for you.