Just want to personally thank Wize for all the input in this thread, as well as Willmatic. I am grateful that there is staff feedback on this somewhat contentious topic.
On the topic of low/mid advanced teams taking over main: I think this isn’t a bad thing, assuming advanced and invite are healthy especially. A team shouldn’t show up into main and expect to have an easy time. The benefit of a swiss system here as well is that throughout a season you will be moved more towards your skill range. So later matches should overall be more even.
I find the sandbagging complaints in main particularly interesting in regards to last season as well. My team won that season and besides like 1 maybe 2 players it was about as much of a “main” team as you could get. Yet we pretty much rolled every team we played.
I feel like the we shouldn’t have strong teams in main because then the div might be hard just coddles players needlessly. Main shouldn’t be a div that you move into and then immediately move out of. Ideally players who just won IM should do okay in main, but they shouldn’t be winning their next season. I actually think that if main playoffs have a couple of teams that didn’t make advanced/lost advanced quals or w/e that’s a good thing. I feel that otherwise you’re basically just encouraging teams to only move up because a team above them died or moved up. Like oh all the hard teams are now in the 16 team advanced so now we get to win main!
Ultimately I think that main should be a challenging division to win, and that there should be a sizable gap between low and high main. It will be a struggle for players that are new to the division, but I think that the swiss system will ensure that they are unlikely to be rolled the entire season.