Agreed with your past sentiments about the GTA Online experience. I find the whole thing to be kind of a cluster ****. GTA IV was just as bad...dropped connections, annoying matchmaking. The only thing this one seems to do better is at least let you stay in servers where the aim settings are the same as yours, or asks you if you want to change yours if you join a game with something different. GTA IV you could have yours set to Auto Aim OFF and it would randomly drop you into games where everyone else had it ON. Real fun...
Every time I get 4 people on, and try and do some of the missions with multiple teams competing for the same objective (2-8 players)...the game doesn't automatically fill in people like it should so it ends up splitting up my crew because there are like 7 people instead of 8 for an even 4vs4.
I've only had a couple decent runs where I was able to meet up with a couple people and play a string of missions without constantly getting bounced or split up.