1. I would presume that NCR was a 3-day tournament last year, and thus for this year, they booked their venue for the same amount of time. I don't the details for NCR, but we booked our venue for UFGT9 back before the new year. In addition, I'm pretty sure it was always advertised as a 3-day tournament. That having been said, I disagree with NCR's decision to start play before noon on Friday. I feel that is excessive, and they might've been able to push play for all games back to start at 3pm or later, maybe. Though if NCR is using the same venue as last year, I believe they may be severely limited on space and thus may not have the room for setups devoted to every game. UFGT is fortunate enough to have a new larger venue this year, so we should be good.
2. I believe that is actually fairly common to not know the exact schedule until a few weeks before the tournament. At UFGT, we state that pools for all games can be run on both Friday and Saturday, so you should try and take Friday off if you want to come. If you have, say, an exam that Friday and cannot miss it, then we will say that unless you want to risk ending up in a pool you can't make, you probably shouldn't enter. (But feel free to come on Saturday for casuals.)
As for waiting to register until the end, that's fine. However, we want you to try and register earlier, since it makes it easier for us to plan the tournament, by, say, making the schedule. That's why with UFGT, Evo, and a bunch of other tournaments, as it gets to the event, we raise the venue fee. UFGT's venue fee was $30 before March 10, $35 until May 5, $45 until May 19 when online registration closes, and $60 at the door (which we don't want you to do). Evo does the same thing, as the price of a competitors pass went up a few weeks ago. Obviously we're not on Evo's scale, but we still want things to run as smoothly as possible, and encouraging people to register earlier helps.
Also, if Tekken players are waiting until the last minute to register, so are SF4 players, Marvel players, KoF players, MK players, Persona players, etc. We try to make an estimate on how many people will register in total based on how the numbers currently stand. So if at the end of March, we have 25 registrations for Tekken and 75 for Marvel, we're guessing that Marvel will have ~3x the number of entrants that Tekken has at the end. This is necessary when determining how many setups we will need to obtain and how many pools we will need to run.
3. Divekick requires less skill to play, certainly, but it is far from being luck-based. And experienced fighting game players do seem to do slightly better at the game. I will add that because Iron Galaxy will actually be there in person may be a big part of the reason that Divekick has a better stream time than Tekken. However, if a game's complexity were directly related to how much stream time it got, we'd be watching nothing but Virtua Fighter on Sunday. (Which honestly, I'm all for.)
4. I was unaware as to the current state of TZ. Most of my connection to the Tekken community is through the guys that play it in Chicago. I will definitely look into getting the info for UFGT on the Tekken Facebook page as you suggest.
EDIT: I forgot one thing on the topic of reaching out to communities. I could be wrong but I don't believe NCR did much in the way of promoting itself to non-Capcom communities, especially when compared to other TOs like SweetJohnnyCage, who posts about ECT on every forum I've seen. Even for Capcom communities, there wasn't an NCR post on SRK until April 3rd. It's possible that the NCR TOs may have been overconfident in their ability to draw for non-Capcom games. I'd also say that some of that may have to do with NorCal as an entire region. It does feel like that's the one place in the country that isn't playing Injustice, irrespective of its absence from NCR.
Thanks for all the questions. I am happy to address them.
