The best solution would be to bring back skirmish and scrap pantheon.
Lemme play devil's advocate here. I don't believe all of these are compelling, but I do believe these are the likely reasons why your suggestion hasn't been implemented:
- The mini-tournaments are fun and there are a lot of players who enjoy them
- The demigods have a light/dark theme which the Pantheon highlights
- A UI change would need to be implemented to remove pantheon and bring back Skirmish
- Another UI change would need to be made to add Occulus and DA to the Skirmish list
- A standing portrait of DA/Occulus would need to be made (recall how Skirmish looked before)
- Skirmish wasn't popular and the's no guarantee players would use it
- The Pantheon website would need a significant change
- Many players just like Pantheon in general and you'd risk disenfranchising them
Again, I don't necessarily find all those compelling, but those are likely the reasons why it hasn't been changed.
What I would really like to see happen is for them to just allow light/dark to fight against each other and for players to earn points for their team, like a sort of fantasy football type approach. So say a side with UB/Oak/DA beats Rook/Regulus/Sedna, and respectively they get 190/75/125 and 40/40/90, then light would get 75+40+40+90, and dark would get 190+125.
Now that might not be as compelling to some people who really like the light vs. dark setup as-is, but I think that the problems it would fix outweigh the severity of the issues it would raise, and personally I think it would be fun to try to have an ulterior motive to get more kills, assists, citadel upgrades, etc. so that you beat that dark/light player on your team and contribute more to your side's pool.
But the main reason why I keep repeating this suggestion is that I *think* it can be done completely on the backend by Stardock without requesting UI changes or assistance beyond a green light from GPG.