If you really want to sign up with 1 friend or more and never alongside (so also not against) random players who just want to have fun without any direction, you should petition to allow it in the tournament mode queue while also disabling the possibility to join as a random player and then rename the queue, problem fixed.
As much as i dislike pve raiding grind, elitists play with elitists and compare against other elitists for world first, while casuals and randoms can join pug raids of any level below T5 however you have some minimum gear requirement. So in a perfect world with a normal playerbase, you would pit T1 against T1, T2 vs T2 and T3vT3 as in PvP where the "P" value equals Player performance and not gear+AA difference, then balance the game around this concept called competition.
You could also normalize all the pvp gear and AA across the classes without any power curve while offering in exchange some variety but some would say it's not very mmo'ish if you can't two shot a newbie and be untouchable with a maxed veteran character.