OK. This is where I get a bit confused about critisizm about the double blinds. If the 5 or 6 hours is long enough to feel you got your money's worth, why does it matter how we get there? The point of quickly advancing blinds is to force action to move the tourney towards completion. Having a less aggressive blind structure that gets the tourney over in the same time frame is going to accomplish the same thing.I might have some suggestions regarding the blind structures which might prevent a huge excalation towards the end of the tourney while providing balance throughout and at the same time preventing the tourney to go 5 or more hours.
I'm guessing that your suggested structure would start at higher blinds (25/50) for the same stack. That means that the early rounds will start forcing action earlier (the round is slightly more important than a 5/10 round) so the "pressure" is on right from the start. By the third or fourth round we'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of 100/200 or 150/300 which is where it would really start to matter and this would be in a similar range as the fourth round of the structure we used (100/200 in fourth round).
After that point, the blinds would increase less severley than the structure we used which would tend to be less forceful, probably easing up on the action (mid-stacks wouldn't feel as pressured to risk lots of chips as they would knowing they will be in big trouble soon if they don't stack up a bit), which would start to increase the length of the tourney.
I'll make this clear: I have no problem with doing a real long grind out 10 hour+ tourney. In fact I'd love it if we could figure out a way to set up something that mimics the WSOP main event structure (10K chips, 2 hour blinds), but that would be incredibly hard to pull off as it would likely take several days to complete and I doubt that we could get a large group to be able to commit to being available for 2 days let alone 2, maybe 3, weekends to put this together. If we have the interest to start much earlier in the day (10:00?) and allow it linger on with a less aggrssive sructure, I'd host that in a heartbeat.
But to me, starting the blinds a little higher to accomodate a less aggressive blind structure so that we can finish in a similar time frame just doesn't make sense. I'd be happy to try it, but I don't understand what is gained from it: 5/6 hours is 5/6 hours and we all have the same hurdles to deal with in either structure.
Can you sell me on why you think a less aggressive structure makes more sense.