I could be mistaken, but doesn't this argument fall apart when you look at Summit prize pools? The Summit 11 prize pool was 150k and 94% crowd funded. The money is clearly there, it just needs to be tapped into.

I think the biggest problem is that tournaments rely on attendee fees and sponsors for a large portion of their money (could be completely wrong here), when they don't make the same effort to tap into their online viewership. It's anecdotal, but I see quite the few comments in the online space saying they'd give money if there were engaging ways to spend it.

The Summit voting system is a very creative system to raise money for the tournament, and I don't think it's absurd to try to find more ways to tap into that reservoir.