...The weakest point in the current system, in my opinion, is the rule about 3 phases of invitation process. In many cases it is well known that some players (mainly low-ranked) won't be sent, but BWF needs to ask the National Federations 3 times in turn, and each time they ask only about small number of players (a few vacancies opened). So, in many cases they don't have time to reach the "150" border and start inviting players according to 3.2.6 regulation, allowing up to 4 entries from a country, even ranked below 8 and below 24.
How it can be overcome? For example, each National Federation send to BWF a list of players/pairs they want to send to WC. The lists can be (and should be) with "margins", so if anybody withdrew due to injury, or whatever, they immediately know the replacement. In this case the "up to date" list of qualified players/pairs can be easily maintained and published on the BWF website. The draw should be maid not too early, I think 3 weeks before the start is enough (for SS it's 2 weeks, right?). In this way we would have almost full draw, and more competitive, with more good players included.
More detailed considerations can be as follows:
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- Sometimes National Federations want their lower ranked players to participate instead of higher ranked, but it's not known apriory whether they would qualify or not. The current "3 phase invitation" system partially solves the problem. In a new proposed system it can be done in a different way. For example, the Federations initially send to BWF their "want lists" with the preferable order of players/pairs to qualify. Then the "preferable order" is used if it provides the same number of entries for the given Federation as the standard one, otherwise the last one (higher ranked players first) is used. In general, the algorithm is not so simple, taking into considerations many Federations and how their "preferable orders" can affect each other, but the solution exists. I simply don't want going too deep into technical details now.