Do you earn crates faster in ranked games or in casual ones

I can confirm from my experience there is matchmaking in unranked games for sure. It's progressively ramped up harder the more I play except when I joined a party with my rookie friend where my opponents tended to match his ability more so than mine.

I like the notion that these leaderboard divisions are the key for ranked matchmaking and just like that perhaps the divisions for cumulative online stats are the key to where you go in unranked. ie Wins, Goals, Saves, etc

There is no reason for bots to actually do that since they're specifically designed to play along with you. So a bot sitting in the goal box and not going after the nearby ball is definitely a hangup in the bot's path logic or something related to that.

It's very likely that Psyonix's AI update set some things back. This happens to pretty much everyone designing AI because there are so many factors that go into intelligent play.