I just realised that I was wrong re: there not being enough high Team Power defences to go around. I’d forgotten the exact contents of this post by Mithran, which I think sums it up alright:
At first, I thought it was because there weren’t enough max endgame defenses to go around and serve people with near maxed score potential - after all, you can field a team of significantly lower than your max possible score (eg., firebombs with no hero), but much data gathering of payouts approaching max possible score and what kind of battles, as well as testing on lower level accounts where I am semi-frequently (and nonsensically) served with defense team scores in this range, I’m ready to call machmaking the primary culprit at this point as to why things are so different than pre-patch. If maxed score players got consistently matched with defense teams within 500 points of the highest score team they could field with some degree of regularity, payouts would range in the 1600 to 2k+ range with PvP points over 50 and about 95% of these complaints would disappear.