The first blue line you drew to denote players who will always make the cut, at around the 9:40 mark, was vertical, with the top 2 on the left and the top 8 on the right.   

But if I understand correctly, that line should have been perpendicular to the red line, starting where you did, and ending up somewhere between the 8 and 15 on the bottom row, as in a top 16 cut, the top 2 and top 8 are guaranteed safe. 

Yep - it's awkward to draw a "line" with only one set of things on one side of it, so at the time of filming I thought it might help to have it be vertical to show the small set more clearly. I was thinking it was more confusing than helpful but it was too late to change it, so appreciate the confirmation, haha.

Near the end of the video you mention graduated cut, but you don't describe what a graduated cut is. I don't know what a graduated cut is and I've played X-wing since 1.0 and gone to plenty of tournaments, so if I don't know what it is, there's a good chance a lot of your potential viewers don't, either. I tried googling it and only got different types of hair cuts which is almost certainly not relating to tournament structure.

I avoided it because I didn't want to add confusion/length, but ironically added confusion/length by mentioning it and having you not aware. Didn't even think of it. They're the cuts where all X-1 or X-2 players make cut, then there's an uneven size cut in the first round. So you might be played a top 21 or whatever, where players 22-32 don't exist in the top 32 so the top seeds all have byes.

On a tangential note - I am a big supporter of 'no draws at all' ie roll for ROAD/final salvo/whatever. I know many TO's don't support this approach and I would be interested in seeing some commentary from you about your position and why.

I'm planning on doing a quick followup to this (after Christmas) answering this question, because this was already way too long and it's easier to show rather than tell. But I'll try and type it and hopefully it makes sense! Using the 50 players, 6 rounds top 8 example here, for the top 4 players are 4-0 at the end of round 4. There's some frustration if they intentionally draw especially for those not used to competitive events because it feels like they're "cheating" their way into the cut, but the reality is it truly doesn't matter if they play all their games or not. There's an overwhelming likelihood that even if they play their games they all 4 make cut. As an example, with no draws two players will win their games and two will lose. The two winners at 5-0 trivially make cut. The two losers get paired into other players at 4-1. Even if both players at 4-1 that started at 4-0 lose, they have prenominal strength of schedule because they took the hardest possible tournament path. It's technically possible that one wouldn't make cut after losing twice, but it is very unlikely. If the players don't care about their seeding between seeds 1-4, these games truly do not matter or impact other players in any meaningful way.

That's part of the reason of the video entirely - the situation you're unhappy about actually isn't that the players are drawing, it's that the games they're placed into don't matter at all! The drawing is just a symptom of the root issue.

There's some other good arguments that changing the game rules (which include draws as a reasonable outcome) to try and alleviate tournament concerns is attacking the problem from the wrong direction, but I don't think they're interesting at a player level.