@Sazed "You didn't state anything about numbers", but you claim that most people wanted to play only much higher-rated opponents. Either you have numbers to prove it, or you are speculating without basis in public (in other words, simply lying).
If you are here "to figure out what is actually broken", I can only copy a post I made about it earlier, because apparently you didn't notice it.
Toadofsky, I explained the most important reasons why I believe these changes to be wrong in #9, probably rather harshly, but it was out of frustration that the community feedback had been apparently ignored. Now I'll try to reword them possibly cleanly and calmly:
1) Basically what Marinkatomb said in #65. The very idea behind creating a custom challenge is that you can choose to play, for example, people 100-200 points upwards from you (to learn from the better opponents) or people 100-200 points below you (to practise beating them consistently), or even people 500 and more points below you (to give them a rare experience, possibly an incentive to study chess harder). I saw that there are some concerns about it giving a possibility of rating manipulation, but as long as the rating system is mathematically sound (and Glicko2 is generally presumed to be), it shouldn't happen.
2) Limiting the opponents to 500 points relative from you, on either side, is very bad on itself, because:
2a) It removes the thrill that, theoretically, your challenge could be picked up in the lobby by an elite GM. Even if it is extremely improbable, for me such a possibility was one of the greatest flavours of Lichess. And at least one of the disputants contesting these changes claimed that it actually happened to him.
2b) If you are a very strong player in a rare variant (for example KoTH or three checks), you can wait for very long until you meet in the lobby someone less than 500 points away from you.
PROPOSED SOLUTION: a slider relative to your rating isn't a bad thing on itself. In order to address the aforementioned problems, I would suggest to change it in two ways:
1) Add position "Infinity" behind 500 on each side of the slider.
2) Make it possible to move both handles of the slider through 0 position (your rating) to the other side, so that you could set the range (for example) -400 to -50 or +100 to infinity.
Alternatively, another good solution was proposed by GnocchiPup in #43, point 3.
Do you think that there is any chance that all these problems could be addressed as suggested (or otherwise)?
Thank you in advance.
#AbC