I’m bumping this thread because something has become pretty clear to me over the tournament season.
There have been numerous cases of players who do very well in the early rounds of Swiss - sometimes only 1-2 rounds - and tnen ID all the way into the cut. This can happen with a Bye particularly often, but sometimes you can just play 2/5 rounds of Swiss and ID all the way into the cut.
I’m not particularly fond of IDs, but a ton of other people seem to enjoy them. But right now they are not functioning with the rest of the tournament structure. The best summary I think is here, from Dan:
IDs were introduced but the number of rounds of Swiss was never adjusted upwards to compensate. This is undermining the whole point of a tournament structure and really needs to be addressed. If you’re running your own tournament series, I would deeply encourage you to either remove IDs or bump the number of Swiss rounds upwards (probably reducing the size of the cut). Right now the format is not functioning appropriately.