I personally still love the main-site tournament. I sometimes forget to vote in it when we have all our discussions on the board, but I'm still very interested in the tourney.
However, in contrast to what a few others have said, I joined the DL because I stumbled across the stat topics, and I certainly wouldn't mind seeing those get more focus. If we're going to cut down on main tournament in any way, I'd propose that we -finally- start linking the stat topics from the duelists' bios. (This has just seemed like the most logical thing to do since I've been to this site. Why provide a bio for a character and not put any actual -data- in their bio!?)
There's a number of different options that I could think of to cut down on the writing without stopping the tournament.
The most obvious one is to simply shorten the length of a normal writeup. Right now, they're about ~5 sentences long enough. Cut this down to a quick 1-2 sentences and suddenly, Djinn here could do every writeup for a week by himself without breaking a sweat.
Another easy one that could work alongside most of these other suggestions is to go with super's suggestion that results comments just aren't important. They're nice, and leave the option open for anyone who gets inspired to write a comment (it happens to me every once in a while, I know). But they just aren't necessary, and most of the time if someone's writing one for a character they don't care about, they just aren't very entertaining anymore.
This could also work for the normal writeups as well. However, people have expressed some concern over how 'empty' the tournament looks without any writeups.
I agree, so I would propose making a 'standardized' writeup for every duelist. They can be the normal length of about 5~ sentences, but their contents would be simply generalized about the duelist's strategic options. Similar to the information presented in the bios, but designs as a hype writeup. This writeup could be reused from week to week, season to season, and only requires work once (though they can of course, be tweaked). This means that our writers who are still diligently making writeups now will still have some writing work in the immediate future, but their is an end in sight. And there's even a lull in the amount of immediate work simply from the duelists recurring in single season. This method keeps the aesthetics of the site intact, and even allows flexibility for writers to add in specific writeup commentary should they feel inspired, without forcing us to write a ton of writeups every update. It's also not even more work than what we're doing -now-. It's an elegant solution to our problem that doesn't sacrifice our options to do it 'the old way' should we feel like it.
On the same idea, the only downsides I've heard discussed about this is that it makes the bios redundant, or that readers won't like it. Well, I'd propose that we make the stat topics part of the bios to reduce redundancy and increase their usefulness (if you're concerned about people thinking stat topics are 'official', then just make a clear note that voting should be done based on your own experience and that stat topics only represent one possible method of viewing a character's dueling worth). Also, we're not getting a lot of new people to begin with, so there's not a lot of people we need to be concerned about feeling 'forced' to vote by the stat topics if we made this move. For the few that might feel this way and express this, I'm sure there's more than enough of us to correct their misperceptions on a one-on-one basis.
Similarly, the fear that readers won't like a standardized writeup seems a silly concern, because the other options (shortened writeups, or No Writeups) present the same possibility. Also, it's much kinder to NEW readers! A standardized bio will have more general information and should be, conceivably, a better introduction than the writeups as we currently write them. I remember from personal experience how utterly confusing the writeups were when I first visited the site. This method is actually more friendly to first-time readers.
I'd also get behind the movement to extend week 6 to week 6-7 (or even week 6-7-8, if none of the workload-shortening possibilities are adopted) to give the writers a bit of a break.
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