Saberdidn't that mikal guy try to do something like this? and if anything this only encourages people to play like europeans (huehue) if they're even at a single round advantage, to turtle up in a ridiculously defensive position and then try to out-lame the other team, especially if there's things to be won on the line. take, for example, that one mge cup that a certain video gamer won by going heavy: if there are things on the line, that's probably going to only encourage playing like a nerd.
I am an active part of the TryHard Stream, alongside several others who have been putting in a lot of hours to create content (http://www.youtube.com/tryhardstream). In no way is this project dead or dying, if anything we're growing rapidly and have been adapting and changing what we do and how we do it as feedback comes in from both the players and the viewers.
As far as the turtling with a single-round advantage: The round timer plugin we've had developed combined with sudden-death being enabled discourages this behavior. If a team tries to run the clock down, it goes to sudden death which favors the attackers, thus there's a real incentive to push. To date, we've still never had a show match go to sudden death, and it's happened all of once in our pug nights (on warmfront). If your team would like to try this tactic and be featured on one of our videos, then please contact me or hex and we'll find someone to pair you up against and we'll see how it works out.
We've also tailored the whitelist to include only weapons that provide and offensive buff at the cost of defense (critacola, axstingusiher) and ban items that only provide a defensive buff and thus slow the game down (wrangler, equalizer). Everything about the rules is designed to prevent turtling and boring to watch defensive play. There's a good chance the timers will be adjusted even further to give teams less time to stand around and build uber.
I totally agree with you on people playing like nerds when there's prizes on the line, but restrictions on things like playing heavy in MGE remove people's ability to do that. Without items like the caber, market gardener, sandvich, beggar's bazooka, wrangler, etc on the whitelist people don't have that option.