i see what you mean about the quantity of pointless matchs, it s true. but i think there will always be some pointless matchs, even if their number tends to decrease (especially because players get better each year). so i think it becomes harder each year to qualifiy for final phasis (or to get a good rank at the poules), which means (on my opinion) that the number of matchs against players of similar level increase.
by the way, i still think that belgian system is unappropriate for the cdm due to its "unfairness" : we made some tests based on the GP 2007 poules and depending on the players the system makes me play against, my ranking could be either 3rd or 12nd (if i remember well) just due to the randomness of the matchups. so for me it is definitely not an accurate system, whatever djo pretends !
and i m not convinced that the actual system leads to unaccurate poules rankings => unappropriate 1/8th finals => unappropriate quarterfinals
i guess the only thing is the "pleasure to play players of similar level".
about fighting games, another thing is that the duels issues are often very depending on the matchups : each player has a character which is (de)favorised against some other characters, thus it would be unfair/ irrelevant to see a good player gets eliminated just because he had to face his nemesis character. for smk, we don t have the same problem since most of players picks the same drivers and everyone is aware of the strengths/ diseases of each character against other ones.
the 7 wins for EVO isn t a rule for all fightings tournaments (for instance i think there just ONE match at the tougeki, which is THE tournament) : i guess it is also to enable players to take other characters in case of too bad matchups.