The atmosphere is not that of a normal elimination tournament with a group stage. The excitement of the football/soccer tournaments is that all the games happen in rapid succession and teams have to adapt and face-off against surprising dark horse type teams.
The court design is a nice touch but the scheduling not being in a playoff-like mode of games every 2 days is robbing us from some real sports drama and excitement.
It needs to be a more focused event, like they need to dedicate a month for only IST games (if anything). Trying to squeeze it into regular season games makes it feel meaningless.