If that's true the person to figure out how to make dating apps work for average guys can make a lot of money...
E.g. slow down showing profiles when they have more than X pending matches. An ex told me she'd paid for Gold on Tinder once out of curiosity (lets you see how many have swiped right on you). Her pending matches were in the 4 digits. These profiles "soak up" a lot of the time and attention of people on these platforms without creating a real chance of matches for users who aren't super aggressively matching everyone.
This again trains for a behaviour where men match a lot, and women can afford to be very selective.
But reducing the displays of the most popular profiles so their pending matches queue is never very deep won't do anything good for revenue.
Another option is to train models to predict likely matches, and sort displays accordingly, but that again won't do much for revenue, because it would mean average men would be more likely to be shown women closer to their attractiveness level which there is less competition for rather than women with 4 figure deep queues of waiting matches.
Remember, most dating sites make money from making it hard enough to get a match that people pay for premium services to increase their chance. They have a built in incentive to exaggerate the possibilities while maintaining friction in actually meeting someone. It must be hard for you to find someone for most of them to do well.
If you can convince people to pay for a less perversely incentivised model, maybe. E.g. a "pay per match" model maybe, if well protected against scammers. But suspect it'd be a very hard sell.
I agree that among the pool of people on these apps, there are lots of matches that would work out among average-looking people. So why doesn't that happen?
It's because a lot of attraction is based on things that photos and profiles can't convey. The medium of "digital app" is just very, very wrong for optimizing dating.
I've seen research that the most efficient way to handle dating is in-person speed dating.
Especially for men. The worst thing is the imbalance. Compatibility in a long-term relationship is certainly based on factors other than looks for both sexes but, like it or not, all relationships start with basic attraction. Women's basic attraction comes from their looks in the vast majority of cases. But for most men, it has to come from somewhere else. Usually status, power, ability, humour etc. So it works absolutely fine for women, but is a complete non-starter for the average man.
I'm not surprised speed-dating is more efficient. My experience with online dating is that even if I find a woman physically attractive I might not find her attractive in real life. We might simply not hit it off, or there can even be other factors like smell that are off-putting. Speed dating eliminates those immediately as well as allowing people to show off non-physical attractive qualities. I still don't think it's optimal for men, though. The best way is to get good at something and show it off in public. Like playing in a band, public speaking, leading and commanding respect of other men etc. That can make otherwise physically repulsive men attractive. There are countless examples.