Hey, since this is like an "experimental series" or whatever...
I was randomly looking around the boards and came across the thread in the melee discussion, discussing the swiss format for use instead of round-robin pools. (Using the swiss format's results to seed a traditional double elim bracket). I attended a tourney like that *forever* ago (think 03/04, I think it was a MunkAid, or it might have been up in the mountains- Ashe County maybe?) and remembered it was lots of fun, lots of matches, and iirc it went pretty quick. Maybe something you might want to check into/think about including?
Incase you aren't familiar with Swiss (I don't have the link handy, but its in the melee discussion forum) your split the entrants into a top/bottom half based on skill (usually through some outside rating system; chess uses ELO... and there's no standard like that in smash) so I suppose you could do it randomly; it shouldn't be hard to be like: "Ok, these dudes are obviously the top 15 players, these aren't... split the group along that line."
Anyway... split them in half, and pair them up randomly (one top half, one bottom half) and let them play. Winner gets +1 point, loser gets +0. Next round; put two 0's vs one another, and two 1's vs another. Next round; pair the +2's together, the +1's together, the +0's together- so on and so forth. You wind up with people close to the same skill level playing one another which winds up separating those handful of players that are close together in skill that you might not be able to really differentiate via traditional pools.
After all that, seed accordingly based on the numbers.