The spectator experience was really good, watching top teams play each other back to back to back with money on the line felt pretty exciting, but as a player it wasn't very fun.

The open groups didn't appear to have any seeding in them (with the number of mix teams and players, somewhat understandable) but what it lead to was having groups that are made up of 6 open teams, a mid team and like a div1 team chucked in there. in almost all of the groups there was instantly one team that was a clear favourite to make it to the ro16, leading to all other games being effectively useless if you couldnt beat a team that might be 2 or 3 divisions above yours, while dominating and stomping teams that are in far lower divisions than yourself.

I personally didn't mind not making it out of the groups as the team that only lost to the div1 team, but when all the other games are either default wins, 4v6 because no one shows up or just 5 minute 5-0 stomps because of the skill disparity, no one really gains anything and the prospect of using the cup as training/scrims for the regular season also just doesn't apply anymore.

after spending hours and hours on waiting for opponents and the next round to start only for it to all be meaningless anyways because only the top1 team makes it out of the group anyways makes you genuinly feel cheated for your time, especially considering that throughout the whole day, 80% of games played by most teams were just 5-0s anyways.

cups are good
cups are even better with switzerland system

Swiss system in the future is on the cards - but we'll need to overcome the problems in the past running Swiss in a cup (match delays preventing next round generation, signups numbers being less than non-Swiss cups).

Personally I think the breaks between games were a bit too long. People should not be too late anyway and long golden cap games can be avoided by just having ties, or like first to cap mid wins the map (like a sudden death or something).

And let's say your opponents were late for a game that ended up being a golden cap, maybe you don't have time to cook food or get food or w/e. Shorter breaks with 1 or 2 longer breaks would be very epic imo.

This!! Obviously it would have to involve some value judgement on what teams are the best, but having like the 8 highest div / suspected best teams play in a separate division could be cool too. Most of those teams would have qualified in an open bracket anyway. (unless they face each other)

I don't like the open groups so i didn't play the cups.
The gap between the skill level in the open group is too high so either you roll enemies or they roll you. It's not competitive and you are probably not gonna learn/improve at all.