How to structure tournaments

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but you are asking a bunch of questions that could best be described as "It depends."

A book could literally be written to describe the tradeoffs you are asking about. There is no easy way to summarize that in an internet post. So I don't even know where to begin.

I will just mention a couple of factors you didn't mention:

1. What type of experience are you looking to provide? Some players want a quicker, shorter tournament. They just want to play for a couple of hours, maybe 4 or 5 hours max if they win or have a good story about going deep. Other players want a longer tournament. An entry might provide 6 or 7 hours of entertainment baring coolers. Maybe even 10 hours with reasonable play.

2. You fail to mention rake. The percentage of rake taken from an entry matters a lot. Even shorter quicker tournaments with ridiculous blinds can be profitable with reasonable rake.

Someone far more knowledgeable than me about tournament structure once told me that one of the first steps to designing a tournament is to graph out the blinds versus starting stack. Have the x axis be the tournament level and the y axis be the number of big blinds in a starting stack.

This will show you any obvious discrepancies during in blind levels versus a starting stack. Please remember that there are no right or wrong answers as to the slope of that graph. Also, keep track (if possible) of ongoing results and graph them. If you have software that allows you to keep track of when players bust you can graph out the average stack versus the blinds to see if there are any cliffs or such. Adjustments can be made to future tournaments from past results.

There are some tournaments (mostly charity type tournaments) where the inital starting stacks will provide a gradual slope providing decent play until registration closes. Then the blinds go crazy and it becomes a crapshoot. Since it is for charity it is acceptable.

In general, a graph that is slowly decreasing (i.e. a longer tournament) favors professional players and skill over luck. A graph that drops off a cliff (i.e. blinds increase rapidly versus a starting stack) increases the luck factor and therefore favors tourist types. However, even given those parameters, it can be finely tuned. A tournament designed to end rather quickly can favor lros if the rake is low enough because a pro will play enough of them to overcome the variance of a quick tournament.

I am probably rambling, but it is only because the true answer is "It depends." You need to figure out what factors are important to you (and by extension, your customers) and tailor the parameters to favor that type of tournament.

Sorry, but good luck.

Are you asking as a player or tournament director? It seems you are trying to set up a tournament not decide which one to play in, so that's how I'll answer.

If I was setting up a tournament I'd just steal structures. WSOP and the Venetian deep stacks are both well thought out and both have their structures on their sites. For a shorter tournament use anything labeled 'turbo' or 'nightly'. For longer ones use ones during the day with higher buy ins.