Voobly vs Steam HD / perspective of fresh player

I started two weeks ago playing online after I watched a German Youtube-Show about the AOE2 HD version on steam and I tought I give it a try.
I know AOE since I got a PC and that's longer than I want to admit. Played the campaigns, played it a lot on lan-parties, very fun game, lots of good memories...

After reading online it's better and all the pros are there, I downloaded Voobly and played there a few matches. Here're my two cents so far:

• the matchmaking is shit on both. Yes, the lobby system in Voobly is convenient and there are more matches at a time to join in
  but neither HD nor Voobly give you good options to filter the lists to your liking. I'm very disappointed that Voobly has no option to filter by: PING, region, skill level or maps. Given that there are lots of different mods, lots of people from around the world who doesn't even speak english, I find myself looking 30 min. for a suitable game. And I never witnessed language barriers in an 2018 online game..., what's going on in South America???

• LAG LAG LAG no matter what version. Both are an excruciating experience because freezes, stutters, input lag...
  Maybe it's because I'm from EU and there's an overwhelmingly count of SA-people with bad connections. It's just not fun most of the time. Even in the Steam HD version, which gives you a Region-filter, I'm not able to find a game which is fluent over the time span of a 4v4 BF game.

Maybe I'm overly sensible, coming from the FPS-corner of online games and know RTS-games mostly from lan parties with friends. Bad pings, input lag and trouble to find good game-lobbies is something I'm not familiar with since a long time ago.

And yes, we're talking about a 20 year old game, which is taken care of by a hand full of dudes between serious projects, so optimizations come very slow.

I know that, and it's just sad, I already lost motivation to get good at the game.