Tournament's goal is to find who the best player is, get decent accuracy when it comes to top 5-10, and then the rest aren't important # wise. Saying you deserved 13th when you got 25th is... inconsequential, honestly. Anybody who wants to take your results as a measure of your skill can look at who you were eliminated by.
If you do multiple rounds of pools, then every pool after 1 has the possibility of being a death pool. This is because you might have high level players getting a bad beat in one random match of their pool, taking 2nd seed, and then you end up with a pool having two amazing 1st seeds and then an amazing 2nd seed. My Pound 3 pool in round 3 had Azen, Chu, Forward, myself, Swiftbass, Azn_Lep, and Alucard. Why? Because Chu and Forward didn't get 1st seeds in their second round; myself and Azen were the two 1st seeds of that pool.
For this tourney I had to play MANGO as my first match, my only saving grace being his brutal hangover. Why? Because he had a 2nd seed from his 2nd pool and there wasn't anywhere else to stick him.
As for the bracket, people can only seed so well and ensure a high number of great players will make it to big important matches. There are 4 quarter-final matchups and 2 semi-final ones; I don't know what players were "supposed" to play M2K in Anti's place because I'm not into the Brawl scene, but somewhere good players must get eliminated by each other or by crewmates because that's how the tournament works. Sometimes, if you get eliminated at the wrong time, it works out crappy for you, but that's how it goes.
Just sayin'. My goal is "defeat everybody at all times regardless of matchup and don't complain even if I have a pool filled with Peach, Samus and Ganon."