Carl, to respond to your question, even if the wild-card play-in game were expanded to a short series, the better team wouldn’t be guaranteed to win. The math works out so that the better team gets a bigger advantage the longer the series is, and the jump from one to three is minimal.
That’s a graph from a guy named Matt Lane showing the probability of winning a series (on the vertical axis) against the probability of winning a single game (on the horizontal). Each curve represents a different series length: blue is one game, turquoise is three, green is five and red is seven. As you can see, for most playoff matchups (where the probability of winning a single game between nearly matched teams is close to 0.5), the difference between the blue line and turquoise line is small.
