Mate centers can be a mixed bag if I will be honest, and therefore my opinion regarding them ends up on the edge of a fence too.
If we speak of the main idea of what the mate center is meant to be, a circle of users doing some sort of match-up with their characters to have so called "mates" to accompany each other or just roleplay together, I see it as a genuine good thing. It's also as others have mentioned before, it keeps people occupied, they have fun and involve many users at once. Even though some users mix it up with "mating", it's still not there for that reason.
In practice though it might not always be that calm and well and problems can easily pop up. Many if not most mate centers tend to be extremely loud(matter of speech) at many points there's a lot of caps going on, and in many cases the countdowns they have could be more considered spam. Since there's usually something going on there, it also easily becomes a good spot for users to go to to "troll".
I can see the good in the mate center, and I can see why some users would use it. Not to step on anyone's paws or anything but I do believe majority of the users that has gotten past the "newbie" stage of playing FeralHeart and reached a slightly older age even, will rather find a so called mate as far as away from the mate center as possible, since it's not really serious enough for their type of roleplaying or interest. Because that's what it is, MateCenter is a very unserious and plain way to get a mate for your character, and even the most new users will learn that rather quickly. But for many it's still fun, and people will do what they think is fun. Mate centers sometimes tire me out since you do tend to need to observe them and make sure people behave, and even though I don't really like them by any means I don't have any reason to really dislike them, especially if you look on the FeralHeart game as a whole and what it provides to many new and younger users.
So even though mate centers is a good thing, it's certain it comes at a prize.
I'm neutral towards it.