I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that any previous competitive MK has longer rounds than a Tekken or Soul Calibur game. You'd also be hard-pressed to say that MK tournaments get higher turnouts than Tekken or SC tournaments. So while time contraints are a valid excuse for some games, I really don't think you can say time contraints are the reason MK has been 2/3 instead of 3/5.
You're misunderstanding where I'm coming from.
First, let's throw SC out of the discussion. Nobody plays it. Nobody. It's not in a single major on the tourney scene anywhere in the country and wasn't as far as I know in the entire calendar year of 2010 through the present. It's not at Evo. It's dead (right now, maybe a new one will come out and change it, who knows). It may be at locals dedicated to SC, who knows. Doesn't really apply to what we're talking about because a tourney with 40 total entrants doesn't have to worry about time.
Yeah, old MK games are super quick. We've actually run tourneys 3/5 (I think Tim and I ran a 3/5 last year for one if I remember right). It's obviously no problem to run those 3/5 if we want. Remember we are also running those tourneys on single setups most often, as we run on Mame or Arcade, this affects the amount of time.
What I'm talking about is MK9, and we are basically planning for the best case scenario, and that is that we get big turnout numbers for the game. The hype train is rolling and it would be a good problem to have to worry about time in tourneys with MK9.
If nobody plays the game, and it goes to being 5 players round robin style after a year, then I'm sure it can be revisited.
*Another point worth making, and I'm not sure if you've ever run a tourney before. But when a major has 6 games going concurrently in the same room and you are fighting to get your players to report for matches, time becomes a serious issue. It's hard to run even the smallest tourney quickly when your players are playing games like MvC and Super at the same time and need to get back for the games they take more serious.