A few years ago (2001 I believe), the scoring system actually did use a template-based system, and while I don't believe the templates were hand-tweaked, there were a few downfalls to it:
- The particular algorithim used did not like lower team counts(i.e. any post season event)
- It required maintaining lists not only for a specific number of teams, but for various numbers of matches per team.
- The particular template format used wasn't exactly user-friendly for tweaking.
Nothing major, true, but at the same time, considering the suggestion includes hand-tweaking the template tables, there would be a large number of man-hours put into analyzing each generated template and optimizing it.
As I believe Ken has mentioned, there are 11 different pairings formulas available in the system this year. The trick is to find the system which works best for the particular number of teams and matches at any given event. I hope to, at the events I will be working at, have the opportunity to test every one of these pairing scenarios to see which works out the best for that particular event.
And in regards to the comment made about modifying the match table, it is not done for a few reasons:
- With the scoring system this year, the functions within filemaker that you have access to are determined based on a password entered at launch time. Therefore, without the proper password(which is not given to system operators at a given event), you do not even have access to the match table directly to perform editing.
- As has been mentioned, the match list is not generated until Thursday night. This is done to prevent the problem of a team not showing up, and them still being on the schedule. With that small amount of time, it does not really allow for any time to seriously look over the match schedule, and still have time to get it copied for distribution to the teams.
- Due to the lack of time to manually look over the schedule, the only real way(short of the match statistics given by the scoring system after match generation) to know of any discrepancies is to have the teams point them out. This becomes a logistical nightmare if you have to modify matches after the schedules are released, then have to either announce changes or reprint matches.