When I went into MM solo, I actually got a couple of games in a decent amount of time, so that's a marginal improvement. However, it was inconsistent in that regard, and one match it took like ten minutes to find a match, and in another match everybody but me and two opponents disconnected (don't know if it was the game or if they all just quit).

The party system is still quite broken, but maybe not to the extent it was last week. In customs last night, Hyokin, Vagueness, The BS Police, and HaloTupolev were able to join each other no problem when it was just the four of us, but other players were having difficulty joining. It still felt like for most of the night we were spending more time in the lobby just trying to get everybody in the game and everything set up than we were actually playing. Also, on one occasion somebody joined us then left, and when I went to switch us from Halo 3 customs to Halo 1 customs, it somehow threw us in the lobby of the guy that just joined. I didn't promote him to party leader because he wasn't even in our party.

Going into MM as a party is still broken. After customs were over, I took our remaining party of four to MM and it refused to match us with anybody, opting rather to just disintegrate our group repeatedly. When it was down to just Tupo and myself, we did manage to find a couple of games, but not without considerable wait times and games failing to load. One particularly bizarre instance was when Derelict was voted for in Team Slayer, but the game failed to load. We and most of the players in the match were booted to a custom games lobby(!) with Tupo as party leader (I was leader previously). He started a MM search in BTB, but lo and behold it automatically put us right back into Derelict like we had voted for the last match... except it was a massive free-for-all battle. So, uh, yeah. That happened.

TL;DR: There are some minor improvements, but it's still mostly broken. The party system only seems functional with certain people, and matchmaking is still a total mess unless you're going at it alone, and even then it's still sketchy.