Then what should the time limit be. 80? 100? 120?
I won't participate in a regular 80 minute tournament. The range is too limited and it allows for less creativity in terms of pacing and genre selection. Anything I come up with would seem like a lame mixtape I threw together. The reason 80 was the limit for mini DIs in the past is that the lists were themed, but if you're opening up the entire world of music, it becomes impossible to make a really nice experience out of it. For a mini DI, you're narrowing the field enough to to make it work. The best lists we've had in standard DI cover a multitude of genres and I want to encourage that sort of variety.
People's ideas should dictate how much time they need. If they're feeling ambitious, allow them to stretch it out and run the risk of no one listening or caring. If they have a very narrow theme or small crop of songs to draw from and they feel they can say what they need to say in 80 minutes, that's fine too. It may very well work in their favor. But not all of us process music the same way.
I can see it from two perspectives. From the perspective of a list-maker, I agree that the longer time limit lends itself to more creativity and to more fully fleshing a concept out. However, from the perspective of a listener, I think a lot of people, including myself, feel that listening to 20 2-2.5 hour lists is just a bit much.
Logically, I feel like either the time limit needs to be shortened, or the number of contestants per contest needs to be lowered(to, like, 5-10). I feel like fewer participants would make ranking easier and less arbitrary as well.
As for ranking vs polling, I lean towards ranking. The reason is that I feel like these contests should be about discussion, and the polls make it more about winning and losing. I understand the argument that the polls were conducive to keeping conversation going as the competition goes on whereas ranking puts no pressure on anyone to participate, but I feel like that was more just because only 2 lists at a time were being posted rather than because of the polls themselves, and I would absolutely support lowering the number of lists that gets posted at a time.
So, I'm imagining something like, maybe a 120-minute time-limit, max, with, say, 5-10 participants, and maybe only one list at a time is posted, or two max. And then maybe we could say, if you compete in a DI, then you can't compete in the next two, or something like that, just so it's not the same ten people over and over again.
Those are my thoughts anyway.