Voting Gauntlet discourages adding new/more friends

So the way Voting Gauntlet (VG) now is to pick a random friend who has chosen to support the same character as you to "help" you in your battles. This is currently the only mode in the game (ignoring daily gifts) which makes use of the friend system, however let me explain why the current way it works is a problem.

So some background, I decided to support vanilla Celica and over the course of the VG I have noticed that 2 of the people on my friend list has also decided to support her. 1 of them is a real life friend who has put up a Brave Lyn (and would change it for me to complete quests), while the other was a random I added who has decided to put up a Lachesis with no notable skill inheritance. The problem now is every time the game decided to pick a random ally for me, I would lose when the game decided to pick the Lachesis. This slowly became a frustration when I lost 3 times in a row thanks to the Lachesis, and I was forced to delete him so the game would only pick my friend who had a reliable ally up.

This becomes a problem as the game dis-incentivise you from adding more friends, especially randoms, because you have no control over what support ally they put up. I know some people like to put up their favorite characters as an ally, but if these characters are not well built they would only impact the chances of others winning, and also obviously we know some characters are stronger than others (unfortunately).

I know people would tell me like "hey you could just use a lv 1" but what if I don't have a lv 1 Celica or whatever character lying around? And should players be forced to play a certain way due to the shortcomings of their system?

And with the upcoming new modes also emphasizing on using allied support units, I can see it being a big problem if they choose to utilize the same method of implementation as VG. Of course we know nothing about the new mode so let's focus on VG. I have 2 simple changes which I think could be made to improve the experience:

1. Allow people to pick the support they want. This is something which most mobages use anyway, so I don't see why they don't want to implement this. This encourages adding more people to get a variety of units to choose from, and you can still add newbies or people with certain unique characters up as you can just choose not to use them.

2. Make changes to the way the current "displayed ally" is done. To elaborate, right now the game picks your displayed ally based on the first unit in your first team. This MIGHT be a problem as some people may not know this is how the game selects which character is displayed as your friend support. I have a friend who actually thought the displayed ally was based on which character was summoner supported, and I can see why he might think this way as there is nothing in the game which explicitly states "this is your displayed ally support character". They probably didn't improve this system as only VG utilizes the friend system but if they want to make more game modes in future which utilizes the friend system (like the upcoming one) I think changes has to be made to it.

These are just 2 quick changes I thought up. Sorry for the lengthy post and I would like to hear more about what everyone else thinks.