If the player base was higher, this issue would have never surfaced, more than likely. I'll keep saying it like a broken record; Adhesive Games/Meteor Entertainment developed Hawken with a very large player base in mind. The number of players should offload matchmaking imperfections and had rendered most of the issues we face today, null.
That being said though, it would be reasonable to start adjusting for such a low player base. However, and this is more geared towards our current devs: invest in a dynamic model that would implement hotfixes to server builds, while avoiding patching the client?
Possible solution?
Currently though, I do agree—the time it takes for a transition to the next match seems quite long, but there shouldn't be a significant reduction. Perhaps implement a scalable time decrease by server average MMR values. For example, starting from server average MMR of 1500, reduce countdown by an integer of 3 seconds, for every 100 increase in server average MMR; consequently, if the value is less than 1500 MMR, increase the countdown by an integer of five. If the server average MMR value is around ~2700 MMR, assuming a ceiling is active, keep a 5 second countdown regardless, so players could at least review the scoreboard. In retrospect, a server with an average MMR value of ~2400 would have a reduction of exactly 27 seconds—meaning that the countdown would only be 13 seconds long. Just a thought.