This seems to be getting rather off-topic and more suitable for a suggestions and feedback thread, no?
As someone whom has served as a TO for over two years: it's the people actively playing and winning tournaments that can best estimate the balance of a tournament idea, in my opinion. It will come with some bias: Darkness based decks almost always got hit by the nerfbat if I had a say in it, because I favored those decks. But if you take away a TO's ability to EVER host and play, these kind of players will just drop the hosting part. Now there are definetely some tournament types where a host should not join, but in general, a host should be able to play and host. This is of high importance to keep the people whom make balanced tournaments, motivated.
This definetely causes issues when arbitrating games, and I have always preferred it as TO when two players come to an agreement on their own. If someone needed deck checks, the decks would usually be uninteresting enough to not be worth copying, no offense. But when worst comes to worst, you will want an unbiased arbitrator that cannot use the deck knowledge to their own advantage. So here we must choose: do we want to ban the most motivated players, that are willing to host to keep tournaments going, from joining, when there already are so few players, just to eliminate the possibility of bias? If we all just played nice and got along, there would be no need for TO intervention. It's usually a case of two people too caught up in the game to be willing to grant the other side a win. Trust me, I've been there, I know. And no, I do not expect everyone to just play nicely, just keep coming to sn agreement with your opponent in mind before escalating it to an arbiter. This is usually the preferred solution for all parties involved, arbiter can then step in when at least one side insist on being unreasonable.
You mainly seem to have an issue with one individual ruling and chalk it up to bias, though. Do feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Regardless of whether that is true, I question how instantly disallowing ANY TO from hosting and playing EVER again, is the preferred solution.
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