Number 2 particularly bothers me. I ran up to people expecting to just be able to challenge them in the plethora of options that comes up, but no. I hope this gets patched in, as it's a pretty big omission.
Technically you can play specific people if that is unclear.
You have to use the "Group Battle" stations. The purple rings on the floor are indicating the machines that are in the group. There are two bigger groups and a bunch of 1v1 groups in the flower peddle formation around the big center group.
It's not the most obvious, and you are still forced to go through the flow of getting into a training session to get matched with the other player which will have to meet whatever connection quality test it runs. Is it the best way to play a specific person? No, but it's not hard.
I mostly like the lobby, but my main issue is quickly becoming how often you have to pick a side, pick a character, pick a cpu character, pick a stage to get into a training session that will then let you start matching. Can we get a preset on the side selection screen that lets you pick all of that with one button press since a lot of times you are just going to be picking the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over