Not trying to be a pain in the ass, but wouldn't it make sense to allow for single person jaegers? From a story perspective, if it's a followup where technology has continued to develop it stands to reason they would find a way to allow for single man piloting since the need for very specific duos makes finding candidates that much harder.

From a game perspective, it's just easier on the players for each to have their own machine without having to have a duo. Character development tends to suffer when people have two of them, two people trying to coordinate controlling the one thing could get bothersome and in the movie the Drift was pretty much just used to justify a quick and easy character link between the protagonists. It just feels like things would go smoother without having to force the team thing.

Allowing for individual pilots could also lead to more variety in characters. Teams broken up to serve in individual jaegers to maximize resources and feeling like they're missing a part of themselves, lone survivors getting back into the rumble after their parners have died, people who refuse to split their old school Drift teams and have the old system installed in newer machines and there's arguments about whether duo teams are more effective or not. It'd just be a part of the setting we could have fun with.

Also, how much freedom do we have when it comes to designing Jaegers? This is just me but I think it'd help broaden horizons if you allow the players to have things beyond what the movie mecha had. This is the next step, we have aliens coming from the stars just like we always thought they would (remember that opening narration?). It'd be fun if more independent, diverse research into Jager technologies as well as Kaiju and even the Malihini led to more variety in Jaeger development.

IDK what the rest of the potential players think.