Itunes 12.2 and iTunes Match

I ripped a few thousand music CDs and thought Apple's iTunes Match service might be a great idea to upgrade the bitrate that I ripped the CDs too. Bad idea, iTunes Match was a complete waste of $25. I don't know what is more worthless iTunes 12.2 or iTunes Match. I'm fairly technical and read several blogs/webpages on how to go about moving my existing library to iTunes Match. Since I have over 25,000 songs I created another Library just for the conversation. I also tried several iterations of adding my songs, enabling/disabling "iCloud Music Library" but nothing works. I don't know why I can't just scan my library and iTunes makes the higher bitrate media available for download. Isn't that what iTunes Match is supposed to do? All my iTunes purchased media just shows up and I can download it at a bitrate of 256kbps. Great, but even if I'm able to add (sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't) my ripped CDs to iTunes, the bitrate is the same as when I originally ripped the CDs. The times I'm able to download the songs from iCloud they are DRM protected. And even then when I check the albums in the iTunes store some songs show as purchased and some songs don't. This is extremely frustrating! I bought into the Apple ecosystem (multiple iPads/iPhones) because most of the technology just worked but this abomination is not Apple's best product. If anyone knows how to use iTunes Match it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks