Argument from credibility is never convincing, but argument from credibility via proxy is even less convincing. If these people have the best reasons for the best rules, they should come out into the public sphere and participate in the discussion themselves. Trying to divine their intentions doesn't seem like a reasonable approach; it's always the best way to do things for everyone to lay out the reasons why they believe what they believe and for the best ideas to win in that exchange.
More importantly though, your argument can be summarized as "having many legal stages causes tourmaments to run more slowly which causes dire problems". That's not a question of who is a top TO or credible or whatever; that's a question of objective fact. Do tournaments with larger stage lists take longer than tournaments with smaller stage lists? If yes we can consider whether that delay is truly so problematic but if no we can discard the argument right away. My experiences over years in the Midwest which means I've been to tournaments with all kinds of stage lists tells me there's no real correlation. Tournaments run late due to loose TOing (not DQing when people aren't present at matches, not assigning stations, poorly coordinating player flow between multiple events, food breaks that are not strictly time regulated, pools that are simply run incorrectly, insufficient equipment, etc.). The actual stuff happening in the game doesn't seem nearly so important; matches that time out almost always average out with matches that go unusally quickly in the end and I've seen once ever a very campy player actually hold up a bracket whereas that other stuff I mentioned holds up events all the time. I'm not even really convinced that the conservative stages produce the fastest games (my experiences disagree there too), but I'm so unconvinced it slows down tournaments either way I'm not sure it matters. Most TOs I've talked to agree with what I'm saying too (certainly I've never, ever heard a Midwest TO say "my tournament ran late because I had too many legal stages") so I'm not even sure where this argument comes from; who in very particular asserts this reason for specific rules?
More importantly though, your argument can be summarized as "having many legal stages causes tourmaments to run more slowly which causes dire problems". That's not a question of who is a top TO or credible or whatever; that's a question of objective fact. Do tournaments with larger stage lists take longer than tournaments with smaller stage lists? If yes we can consider whether that delay is truly so problematic but if no we can discard the argument right away. My experiences over years in the Midwest which means I've been to tournaments with all kinds of stage lists tells me there's no real correlation. Tournaments run late due to loose TOing (not DQing when people aren't present at matches, not assigning stations, poorly coordinating player flow between multiple events, food breaks that are not strictly time regulated, pools that are simply run incorrectly, insufficient equipment, etc.). The actual stuff happening in the game doesn't seem nearly so important; matches that time out almost always average out with matches that go unusally quickly in the end and I've seen once ever a very campy player actually hold up a bracket whereas that other stuff I mentioned holds up events all the time. I'm not even really convinced that the conservative stages produce the fastest games (my experiences disagree there too), but I'm so unconvinced it slows down tournaments either way I'm not sure it matters. Most TOs I've talked to agree with what I'm saying too (certainly I've never, ever heard a Midwest TO say "my tournament ran late because I had too many legal stages") so I'm not even sure where this argument comes from; who in very particular asserts this reason for specific rules?
for seemingly no reason. But I did complain about the lack of Skyloft and Wuhu Island, so they added those.
