One of the problems with the current setup is that the low cap numbers and the dividing of the player base among many different arenas, make it extremely difficullt to balance sides.
If a squad logs on enmasse, even a small squad of 10-15 people (About the size of the squad I belong to) it has a big impact on an arena that might only have 125 folks playing. People can change sides, but then if a squad logs off enmasse, as someone mentioned in one of the many posts on the new system, things are thrown off balance again and the people willing to switch can't do it again to immediately balance sides.
Add to that the churn factor, people logging on in hopes of finding a fight, finding that the 25 folks on side A are happily battling the 30 folks from side B with both totally ignoring the poor saps on side C, and logging off and going somewhere else in hopes of finding some action, and you can see the difficulty.
I like the idea of being able to choose your country, particularly if you could see what countries other folks who are logged in have already selected. This way you can join up with squaddies.
I also would suggest doing away with the chess piece names, coming up with something totally different, so people have no particular loyalty and might be willing to give switching sides a try.
As for waiting for the waves to settle down, I would just observe that with more than a thousand posts generated by this new system, we are not looking at "waves" but at a tsunami.
I don't know if anything can be done now to help the situation, but I don't see it ending soon.