Help! The A-20

tl;dr: I don't enjoy the A-20, is the russian light line worth it?

Fyi, I'm a WOTB player who recently switched to WOT PC. Back in WOTB, in order to be competitive, I mostly played mediums, and that got me bored pretty fast.

Now that I could play WOT on PC, I want to try something that I couldn't earlier: playing light tanks. Though I'm not the best light tanker by any means, I had lots of fun with them.

I decided to take up the Russian lights since I heard that they are the best light tank line. I enjoyed the BT-5 for its autoloader, the BT-7 for its speed (though I felt it was a bit underpowered)

But,

The A-20. While I have a couple of decent games with it (mostly from hunting artilleries and such), I found myself in a difficult situations when engaging equal tier opponents: The alpha is not enough to combat lights, and the pen is not enough even against mediums, most of the time I have to rely on golds.

So, my questions are, does the line get better eventually? Is there anything I need to take into consideration to do better in this tank?

Thanks.