Hello, BDSP tier leader passing by, wanting to put two cents on a matter that is personal to me, otherwise don't count much of it
I feel personally insulted by Aqua Jet not even naming me when I'm the current tier leader
I've underlined the names of the people who I've seen actively build and play BDSP
You underlined three people that stopped contributing to the tier long ago and one banned user (since August, mind you) while missing important contributors such as one of the longest Council members on the job (Lily), the BDSPPL I winner (Drud), the Kickoff winner (Quartosa), and people such as Beraldinho that came close to win the entire Circuit, which makes me think you don't know the tier and the past/current users to actually judge it with good eyes.
...as every other tier does? Boy the amount of recycling some tiers or tours probably makes eco-friendly enough it would qualify as renewable energy!
Jokes aside, while I don't think this was a good argument against BDSP's inclusion, I also don't see much merit in the points FOR BDSP's inclusion; as already said, it's a foreign tier to SS; different learnsets, different items, different pools of Pokémon to the point it's a completely different experience than SS, even taking in account their same "makeup", as both are Gen8 in substance. A fairer comparison to the WCoP point would be being able to vote for a Other Metagame in it, which as we all can assume, will never happen.
Also, as someone pointed out, this is also seriously downplaying some managers' capabilities, especially on a stacked pool such as this. If you don't trust managers to be able to figure out the BDSP slot, then why they should have trust in the community to expect something out of it? This is a point I won't dwell on much because I obviously don't wanna feed words into others' mouth, but if I were one, I would think like this, and I'm not judging anyone who did.
Lastly, I'm still the direct connection between BDSP, and I made a judgement call as both leader and host; I saw pretty much the merits of other SS tiers into it (mainly the third OU slot and Monotype) and how much the community was already against BDSP even before gauging the effective player count, and I never saw or have ever done an actual argument for BDSP's inclusion that wasn't "it's the only possible choice because the rest is even worse on paper", so we made the executive decision of trusting our managers to choose what's best for the tournament; now, you might argue that they will choose what's best
for them, which is undoubtedly true, but when such a majority is achieved this is directly reflected on the health of the tournament itself, which I have an obligation to care about, no matter where my allegiance lies.
Maybe I was deaf to my community, and I want to say sorry for it, but for everyone else BDSP was too alien of a tier to have in this SSPL, and I didn't see particular reason to keep BDSP in, so we just went along on what the strengths of this tournament is, which is the direct SS ecosystem.
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Now, on another different point: I personally quickly want to say I'm very grateful for all the application we received in the manager signups, and if I could i would have chosen 14 of you, not just six or eight, because every single one (almost...) of these pairings have something I actively look out for, being competent managers, having a spectacular power level, amazing team presence, or even multiple of these qualities. I'm sorry for everyone that didn't make the cut, and you're free to discuss which one of them in your head deserved it more than others, but at the end we (hosts) weren't going to sit down and "deprieve" OLK of a fair chance of keeping his managerial spot for something that, at the base, was outside his control; he deserved a repick, we deliberated on it and he was allowed back; nothing less and nothing more to that. You could easily argue this wouldn't have happened in a normal tournament, but what's normal in seeing your manager be banned not even half an hour after being selected? Sometimes you just have to go with your gut, and this is what we went with, especially when we internally operated with bases that allowed us to take these series of decisions.
That being said, and apologizing for the chaos these days presented, I wish you all a great first SSPL!