KanecoPersonally I think i55 camerawork was mostly fine and the cheat feed worked to our advantage, the number of sick plays and shots caught by it was really amazing and as a video editor it really helps a lot to have it happen on stream as it's much easier to annotate and save highlights for future recordings.
Im not sure why really the decision for moving away from it since as I said I think the camerawork was fine, probably the only downside I can see from it is that it kinda kills the element of surprise where if you were using it and move into a different player pov we are always expecting some play to happen and it tones down a bit of the excitement but other than that I think its very useful.
The idea is to be able to show more of the LAN experience. There was so much extra footage that we couldn't show because of issues with the delays between the camera taking the footage and syncing it with the end of the stv. Syncing a bunch of venue cameras with different delays and the extra latencies of transferring that to the production PC is very complicated and has caused us problems in the past. It also simplifies a lot of other things such as STV pauses and interviews where the players aren't hanging around for 90 seconds after the game or even going missing altogether and hearing spoilers from players cheering 90 seconds before the game ends etc. These problems don't go away until you remove all delay. I could work the cheat feed with as low as a 5 second delay if necessary but even with 5 seconds you need all this extra work to delay everything 5 seconds.
Basically the only real advantage of the STV delay is the cheat feed (aside from things like ghosting which shouldn't be an issue on LAN) and it comes with a whole load of technical difficulties that just disappear if we run it live.