I hope you'll reconsider the PUG matches.  Once you understand how the system works, you might really enjoy it.  The reason why the pugs are popular is precisely because they often result in competitive and sometimes epic games.  The idea of having two captains draft the teams in an A-BB-AA-BB-A draft order is to obtain balanced teams.  The first captain gets to pick the best player on the board, but he also get thes least talented player with his last "pick" (which isn't a pick but whoever is left over).  Pugs are popular because they are the opposite of team stacking--as long as both captains are about evenly matched and know who most of the people are the teams are unlikely to get stacked.  In contrast, playing Tops vs. Bottoms (TvB) could result in stacked teams and even teams with nasty smurfs on them.

I think you'll probably want to start pugging after you have some more experience with the game and perhaps after you know more people in the online multiplayer community.