True - but you're in the position of having to quit the main game, load arena, pick a mode, and *then* discover whether or not there's any games available ... and if there's not, go back through the whole process to get to your ship.It is accessible... Main menu and click 'ARENA' for god's sake lol
Compare with multicrew where you can just put out a request for crew or a request for a crew seat, in the various modes, while going about your normal business, and it visibly indicates in-game where people looking for matchups are. Multicrew hasn't necessarily been a massive success - certainly the feature needs more work and more time - but it would be a lot less-used if you had to drop to the main menu to start a multicrew session [1]
Having an option in the comms menu, which let you start queuing for CQC while flying about, showed you which queues had games/spaces, and sent you an "accept match" option once it had built the match? That would make it a lot easier to get into games (they could have the main menu option too, sure - maybe even add a multicrew one to go with it - for people who don't have anything interesting to do with their main ship right now). Maybe even let you build a main game wing and then queue it up as a CQC squad ... anything's better than the current CQC squad interface.
(You can invite people who are currently in the main game to a CQC squad, and it will pull them into CQC if they accept, so the mechanism to do this is already partly there ... how much work to finish it off I wouldn't like to guess, but presumably non-trivial)
[1] Even though, in technical terms, this is pretty much what happens: you get a spinning ship for your host when you join a crew, you get a spinning ship for your real ship when you leave ... but it's much nicer than exiting to the menu and then clicking "play mode: multicrew"