I tend to agree with you all, but I will give my business speculations as to why this might happen. When we began cheer we were told to be there, flying or driving, the Friday before a comp and if you were flying, you had to leave on Monday, because the schedule came out the week of the comp. Problem #1, when schedules are provided, and with the hotels getting more expensive, people aren't going to pay for hotels stays they don't need. Logical. However, when your company depends on a certain number of hotel stays with STP to get a venue on the dates they want, that's a problem. #2 People get married to schedules. In a sport where there are very few alternates, coaches and EP's need parents to be flexible. If it's stated that awards are going to be at 3:30 PM and some parents book the 8:00 PM non-refundable flight out to avoid another hotel stay, there's no room to be flexible with injuries, stage clean ups, etc.
Releasing scores and awarding bids based on those scores when there are multiple arena's....this one I saw coming. You can't have multiple arena's and expect precision judging when you have 18 scored categories and it only takes a .1 in each of those categories to make a huge difference. That forces the judges to then look at the day 1 scores and compare by arena and re-adjust scoring for day 2 to make sure the scores are in line for bids. Cue all of the videos and people asking, "Why did their score drop 1.0 pt when they had a better performance day 2, than day 1?" Um, because J3 hit a better routine in Arena 1, but scored .6 lower than their S3 in Arena 2. Cheer is unlike any other sport when it comes to number of arenas and number of athletes being compared and releasing scores makes it absolutely no more transparent. "Olympic ice skating" ...enough said.
Cost. There are ways to fix some of these things, but it would require events lasting much longer than 10:00 PM. Cue the, "just take less teams".....okay, the price just went up to $45 for admission and $180 per athlete and now they may not have enough hotel stays to get the venue contract next year. Again, just speculation, but I can see these things being issues from a business perspective.