What is going on?

I've been playing Dota 2 now for a few years, I have a bit over 1700 hours, yet I've never gotten over 1k MMR or crusader rank. I have 2 people i queue with, we follow the meta, we follow guides, and we play combos but we've never gotten out of our rank bracket. It always feels like we're playing with people far better than us despite them having either far less hours than us, usually around 500 or they have far more, sometimes reaching the 14,000 mark. Are we doing something wrong? We are doing everything that gets recommended to us but we lose far more games than we win, it almost feels like we've been shadow banned to constantly play with smurfs… Is there any recommendations that we've somehow overlooked that can help us get out of this ranked bracket. I know that we should try to look at what the enemies are doing better than us but it's almost always just a mechanical difference and losing so many games is just making the game mundane. I feel as though we're ten times better at the game than a year ago yet our rank hasn't improved at all.