Just a note on the beginning: I didn't want to admin this big event first But it somehow "fell on my back" later and also I kinda saw that if I don't step in, the event would go into an unpleasant troubles.

Now when the tourney is over for a few weeks, my "updated" idea of "ideal nations cup" has settled quite well and here is how I see it.
The tourney should:
1) not take too long time
2) focus on the final stages on the tournament
3) have admins with lots and constant amount of free time
4) focus on the favorized teams rather than on outsiders
5) not limit signed players anyhow

Let me comment on these thoughts a bit more:
The Time
QNC2k8 started in January and ended in June and that was way too much. If this happens in a tournament, lots of players will go inactive and the lineups of the teams will change, which decreases their performance and removes the initial motivation of the team.

Why did the tourney take so long?
We had 16 teams which we divided fairly into 4 groups by 4 teams. After some time some matches were played, but still a lot matches were remaining. We didn't set any strict schedule so it was up to the teams to play their games. What we didn't realize, though, was that some teams got confident with their actual position in the group and therefore lost the motivation to play the remaining match or two. If this happens for all 4 teams in the group, the remaining matches will never get played. That is the right time to move on and start next stage of the tournament. We didn't see this and we were waiting for group games to be played for too long. And then putting all 16 teams to playoffs was a big mistake too.

Finals stages and favorized teams are important
Another delay happened during the playoffs where some of the outsiders stated that they don't want to play any more matches. As an admin I had no understanding for this (and I still think it's a bit lame behavior), however it took me too long time to accept it and finally give out walk-overs. This hesitating only damaged the tournament and teams that actually wanted to play more matches.

Tournament format
In my opinion, much better format for 16 teams would be groups 4/4, then remove 1 lowest-scoring team from each group, make new 2 groups with 6 teams in each. Then remove two lowest-scoring teams from each of the two groups and finally start playoffs with 8 teams. Full Double Elimination is good! Once you have teams that are willing to play and are active, the enjoy FDE.

This whole system helps good teams getting more games against other good teams, therefore practice more and most importantly it's a better way to remove outsiders from the tournament soon enough before they start to delay the whole tournament.

The Finals
And the most important thing about the tournament are the finals anyway. Everyone outside of the scene cares about "the best of the best", so the admins should make sure that finals are well covered, that the favorized teams reach the finals. This made me give out walk-over for some semi-final matches, Russia A and Sweden C left the tournament by walk-over - it was a high price for getting the tournament finished. But I still think it was necessary.

Admins with constant amount of free time
Because I'm still studying, I had lots of free time I could spend on IRC forcing teams to schedule the games - or better to say, scheduling the games for them. This was my main role as an admin here, without this I can't imagine how the schedules would be done.

An admin who is able to message team leaders every day is necessary. It's not a job where you can decide "ok, I have free time now on monday, I'll talk to the teams" - this won't work, because probability that everyone who you want to talk to will be online exactly on monday is very low

I did even another step towards the teams - I joined their channels instead of making them join some "our" channel (tournament channel). This at least helped me to see when the people are typically online.

Coverage
Coverage is important. I'm surprised how other tournaments don't realize this. One news post every week is what is necessary. Since I was alone, I got tired of admining and preferred longer news posts not so often rather then shorter but periodic. But well, at least this. Coverage "is the shit", every tournament needs this, put "drama" and some good thoughts in the coverage. Just scores, statistics and tables is boring, static, "dead".

Commentary
I was surprised with the help I got from the QW commentators. It's only important to know where to ask and if they have time, they will gladly do the commentary of your tournament matches. It's good to know in advance when a match will get played, but well, this was very hard in QNC. So typically most commentary was "uh well they asked me 10 mins ago to do the commentary so here I am, sorry what tournament is this?" But still, it was much better than no commentary at all.