[*Rachelle*]

I personally like how the playoff tournament structure is set up this year. A couple of reasons for this:

In the old structure when the alliances had to play head to head, the 4th and 5th seed would play against each other with only one of them moving on. The problem would be, what if both of these were better than the 3rd seed and they both deserved to move on, but couldn't specifically because of the head to head format making it much easier for the higher seeded alliances to move on even if they weren't the best of the 8

The same kind of thing goes for the 8th seed alliance. In the old structure 8th seed was basically a death sentence because the alliance had to play against 1st seed for a spot in semi's, and therefore they almost never moved on even though they may be better than the alliance that took the 4th semi's spot. (I do realize that this year's structure would be harder to implement in a game involving more defense)

Now, you can have 1, 8, 4, and 5 move on if they have all proven themselves to be among the highest average scoring alliances regardless of who they played against. (And you get to play against more than one of the other alliances in quarters and semis)