I don't know how well this post will be received, as normally I don't comment on shit like this - but this is something I actually have experience with, so here we go doogs.
Yo. The draft thing.
Long story short, I used to play a game. It was a niche game, with a "comp" scene even smaller than tf2's. Let's just say I was pretty fucking good at it.
Similar to invite tf2, one or two teams generally dominated everyone else, with the other teams having no chance at winning anything other than the occasional upset. People brought up the idea of a draft, and used the NFL comparison. Other people saw the obvious flaw in that comparison; that the NFL is more about money and entertainment than it is about fun or competition. It's a business, not a hobby, that can afford to pay it's players lots of money to win or lose.
That's the obvious flaw, but there's a lot more to it than just that. Check this out, doogs.
The NFL also has coaches, managers, owners, and a whole staff of people involved in drafting their players. The players themselves don't do that shit, and for good reason.
Lets say you want 9 invite teams. You need to pick 9 player-captains who are going to draft their teams. How the fuck do you decide who those players are? Are they the "best" 9?
Who decides who the "best" 9 are? The playerbase? LOOOOOOOOOOOOL, please. Put yourself in an invite player's shoes. A bunch of people who think X player is better than Y player because he/she got better stats in a certain game, or had a couple flashy plays which happened to get caught on stream are now going to have a definitive say in how your season is going to play out. You would be mad, don't lie.
Ok, so you can't just do it by player vote, then what? Do you have players volunteer? What if you get too many? What if you get too few? What if they just pick their friends instead of top players? What if they pick the wrong people?
Think about it, yo, how many 5-0 roll captain pugs (inhouse, irc, or otherwise) have you been in? But this time, it's not "fuckkkkkkkk these teams suck, I can't wait 'til this pug ends."
No. This time it's "fuckkkkkkkkk these teams suck, I can't wait 'til this season ends."
[Not to mention, pug teams which have a medic captain are generally at a disadvantage unless the other medic(s) are of vastly inferior competence]
So, ok, you really have to make sure those 9 players are qualified in order for the teams to even have a shot at being truly balanced. Say you settle on 9 players who are qualified. The first three or four would be obvious, but after that it would get pretty gray on who to pick over who. Is it really possible, to in a game with so many subjective variables, pick the 9 best/most qualified captains? Further more, are "best" and "most qualified" even the same thing?
You might think I'm alluding to players being butt-hurt over not being captains, or not being selected as one of the "best 9 players" - that's not it at all though. It's the exact opposite; being a captain is what you (as a high invite player) wouldn't want.
Let's go hypothetical real quick.
For this example, these players will be captains:
b4nny
ruwin
seagull
platinum
enigma
lansky
tyrone
TLR
Clockwork
For the purposes of this example, let's assume all of those captains are perfectly evenly skilled/competent (we all know tyrone is the best, but bear with me).
Say you have another player who is on par with one or more of the captains, but isn't a captain due to there being a limited number of captain slots, or that player returning from a break, or w/e reason.
Let's say that player is none other than the one and only Calvin in da Zone (aka calzone). Enigma wants to play with platinum, but he can't, because he's also a captain.
Calzone possesses the same skill level as Enigma, but he's not a captain, so he can be on Plat's team.
In this example, friends can't play together, even though it would change nothing skill wise. Sure, you could implement a player-trade system. But should a captain really be able to trade himself to another team (and inadvertently trade his captain spot to another player in the process)?
Say the players in question aren't both captains: what if a team doesn't agree on a trade because they don't get along with a certain player/prefer one's play-style to another's?
TL;DR: there are so many fucking ways that players can get fucked over for a season and not have fun.
"But, the bottom teams in invite aren't having much fun either since they just lose to the teams at the top, and have no hope of winning"
True, but they make the choice to play in invite, as a team; knowing that they will be facing almost insurmountable competition. Imagine how much it sucks to make it all the way into invite with a team of your friends, winning your way through IM (or main, now), only to lose to almost everyone in invite because you are hopelessly outmatched.
Ok, now imagine that you're hopelessly outmatched due to unsuccessful captaining, and you're losing to everyone in invite; but this time, you're not even playing with your friends.
(Unsuccessful captaining could refer to either blatantly bad picks, or picking a team that maybe someone thought would be good/looked good on paper, but ends up being mediocre/poop).
Low-invite teams of friends have often failed to last a season. Imagine a low invite team that shows up to scrims like they are showing up to a fucking job, and then afterward they all go hang out with their actual friends, because they don't give a shit, or even outright dislike each other. How long do you think that team would last?
Forget all that shit I just said, let's pretend you actually make 9 perfectly even teams. Then what? A team winning or losing is really just going to come down to luck. Is there even a point in having a four team LAN final if the other 5 teams could have easily been in their places on a different day? To me, that shit seems like it'd be pretty boring to watch from a spectator standpoint, and really lame/annoying/a chore to play in from a player standpoint.
Sorry if this post was mad discombobulated.
Oh, and since this thread is really about preds:
Decimate is gonna go huge. They wanted to know, what it looked like. (only he will get that joke, sorry).
edit: grammar fix, my b.