Kyle, I'll MM you at your tourney in SA. I can't be sure I'll go to this.
Also, have you considered changing the first match set up to the California Knockout system, BeBoBli? Its kinda nice.
Are you talking about the thing where you each strike a stage until one is left? That would be fine, but there's an even number of random stages in Melee, so it would have to be modified (probably just have two left and do a coin flip), and there's only 6 stages, which makes it somewhat pointless. In Brawl, there were complaints about the first stage not being any good for one player, but I don't see that often in Melee. Most of the neutral stages are actually neutral.
Of course, we could do an easy California knockout thingy by not allowing one stage to be random. A choice between Yoshi's Story, Pokemon Stadium, and Fountain of Dreams. But doing that would probably just yield a lot of debate.
IMO, you should each just strike a stage, but make it so it's not able to be chosen for the first match,
period. Not that whole "if you get it through random, you can reset, but if it's chosen again, too bad" system.