but even you say in your reply "We constantly see Diamond and Champ players dominating Bronze and Silver tournaments" so the present system has not been effective even in its current implementation.
I should've clarified better. We see them constantly dominating in tournaments that either don't impose an increased entry, the increased fee pales in comparison to the payouts, or they're inactive in the format (Modern/Wild) that they're entering.
There's also a loophole that's exploited quite frequently, or at least it used to be before the ban on bots in Modern and people started playing more on that side there instead of Wild. I've been a bit busy lately so I haven't paid much attention to it lately, but basically what was happening though, is we'd see players playing Wild, but not playing in Modern. This would give them an extremely low rating in Modern while their rating in Wild would put them in Diamond or Champ. Due to their low rating in Modern, and the increased fees being rating and format dependent, they weren't being hit with increased entry fees. This worked out well for them because it was giving them access to most of the tournaments in Modern and because the Wild tournaments rarely have an increased entry penalty, they were having almost full access to those as well. It did cut down on the number of people smurfing, but it's still pretty common.
There was a lot of resistance to league lock because of the fact that it lessened the tournaments one could enter
I do agree that this is going to be the main argument against any type of league lock. It's a shame that the one person that really seemed to care about fixing all of this was let go. I also agree that there's likely ways to get around a one up, one down type format, but I do still think the extra work required to do so would deter some, if not most of the bad offenders. I've been wrong before though.
Thanks for the reply!