Personally I could never get into dota until it freed itself from the UX restrictions of being a custom map for another game. With matchmaking you get even games even at low skill levels, I certainly didn't find that I had to sink 100s of hours into it before it got fun (I don't think I've played more than 100 yet).
That's good. Maybe matchmaking has improved because when I was starting out I had a ton of games where I was against a duo-queue and the high skill player just dominated the game.
Oh it's definitely not perfect, you still get plenty of games where you're poorly matched. But it's good enough to be fun if you're willing to take a beating sometimes, and make judicious use of the ignore function.
