Well let me try and clarify this a bit.
There are no "smoking guns", Field Faults or conspiracy theories regarding the scoring and timing overlay being removed from the big screen.
For those that aren't aware conference calls for Emcees and Game announcers are held prior to the competition season and on the Monday evening folowing all competition weekends. removing the overlay from the screen during the last half of the matches in
Eliminations only was recommended in order to heighten the excitement of the crowd. The feeling was that having the overlay on the screen all the time kind of put a damper on the results due to the great real time scoring that was put into use this year.
This is NOT a new concept and has been a regular occurrence in past years.
As far as other Regionals such as NYC I can only say that it appears they did not follow this format for whatever reason. I was a judge at the Rutgers MAR event and the overlay was removed during Eliminations there.
For teams going to Championships I'd bet dollars to donuts that the overlays will be removed during Eliminations on the Division fields and on Einstein as well.
As far as looking at the screen for time left in the match, as someone mentioned earlier the time is shown on the front of each player station. As a matter of fact on a humorous note: One of the Emcee's at the SBPLI Regional introduced "Team 15" for an early match. I explained to him that team 15 was so good that they were in EVERY match
Then I told him what the 15 really meant..........