Hello, my name here is Spiralstevie.
I wanted to suggest "Party Selecting", but on my way to doing so, i came up with another suggestion, "Steam Login".
First of all, let's talk about the Steam Login.
I wanted to post here on the forums and I found it highly annoying I had to create an account first. On some other STEAMgame-related sites you often see that button "Sign in through STEAM". It allows you to securely login to sites through STEAM, and since a lot of Spiral Knights players play only on STEAM and not through the site, I think it would be incredibly handy because then we could post on the forums here also without needing to create an account first here for those few forum posts we're doing.
So, the second request, why I came here in the first place - Party Selecting.
I think an advanced Party Browser would be amazing. I often want to do Jelly King/Vanaduke but do not want to waste a lot of energy on doing the levels before it. I can choose to wait for friends to arrive at the Terminal, or try my luck joining a random party and hoping they're in the Terminal. So, an advanced Party Browser would be handy so that you can open some kind of menu at a gate & choose which party you want to join. It would look like a list with a lot of different parties, named after who is leader, and showing their current position. You can then expand it to view all the members currently in there and also inspect them. And of course, a "Join" button. (Note though, the browser should only show non-full parties for convenience.)
Why did I come up with this idea, you may ask? Well, two things. (1)I wanted to get a sealed sword, and I had 19 tokens. Dammit. So I try my luck, join a random party, hoping they're at terminal, but no. They're not. They're at the first level of Tier 2(not moorcroft, the first actual level. instant -10 energy). Kinda waste of energy doing the entire levels, but I thought, it's okay. But then, what really pissed me off making me waste all my time writing this on the forums: (2)the party leader just kicks me for no reason at all. So now, I'm in the very first level of Tier 2, all on my own, with no party. I just left because I didn't want to solo. Those 5 seconds of being there in a level without teamies cost me 10 energy. :/
So, thanks for reading all of my text, if you would like to somehow improve my ideas and/or leave feedback, go ahead. :)
-Stevie.
The forums don't support steam login yet, but considering naming conflicts you'd likely have to make a new one first anyway.
On your second idea, thats gonna be shot down fast. By game design you should be spending, on average, an equal amount of time in the first and second stratums of a tier. But since parties are not always available at the start of a tier, the game will put you in an existing group so you don't have to wait on a party.
This is of key importance since the rewards are different for each stratum, and dev team has shown that they do not condone repeated attempts to bypass levels for the purpose of maximizing profits. They do however, allow joining friends and guildmates on the merit of playing with people you like.