This thread does have the potential to be insightful for anyone willing to read all the way through it. But yeah, now that I have, there are so many things to say...
I think I've had enough of the theory-bashing. Theory was under a lot of time pressure to get this tournament to happen, and also clearly hoped that the general friendly play of people on isotropic would prevail, rather than having to sit down and think through a foolproof ruleset. And as we're discovering, foolproof rulesets are hard to come up with. Enforceability is a big issue, but as Personman has discovered (re: collusion), it's rather tough to actually have in an online tournament. Still, theory tried to enforce it by encouraging people to record the finals and reserving the right to DQ afterwards from those videos. And so in the end, even if it was only half an hour before the finals, theory arrived at at least a pretty decent ruling.
One thing I'm still a little confused about is why WW decided to ultimately withdraw, after theory's final ruling. I can offer some possibilities:
1) He was unhappy that theory was changing the rules. First, it's at least a little ambiguous that spreadsheets are disallowed in the rules. If you have to dig up a post by Donald X on the forum to get the official ruling that's further than most players will go. It's certainly more ambiguous than "identical starting hands" for those who want to argue that theory arbitrarily ruling "okay, so in the finals you guys don't get identical starting hands" would be unfair. So a clarification was certainly in order. Second, the rules never said, "Any changes to the rules must be approved by all players"; that clause is pretty clear about only applying to use or not of the official point counter. But most importantly, we all know how little time theory had to plan this tournament out, and as such, should cut him some slack with clarifying or redefining rules.
2) He expected Personman to cheat and use the PCE anyways. I think this is very unfair to both what Personman's words explicitly said and to WW's own arguments themselves. Personman was not actually planning on cheating; he was just giving the usual unenforceability argument he's repeated several times in this thread. And what do you know, in the real match he didn't cheat at all. I don't see a reason to suspect he would have with WW playing.
3) He objected to playing a game with someone who used Personman's style of reasoning, whether you want to call it relativist, or consequentialist, or what have you. Well, all I can say is that that would be like not playing with atheists. It doesn't actually affect the game and seems a bit non-sequitur. He'd certainly have the right to do that, like anyone has the right to be racist in who they live near, but I'd at least be disappointed if that was his final reason.
4) He didn't think through everything as clearly as he can now (happens to all of us) and would have re-entered had he had more time to think it through.
5) He was away from the computer for the half hour between theory's ruling and the start of the match.
I don't really have evidence against 4 or 5, except for the lack of WW complaining about the timing or apologizing and saying he would have re-entered on second thought.
Of course, WW doesn't have to respond to this if he wants to keep his reasons private. But he's entered the conversation so far, so if he's willing, I'm curious what he has to say to this.