There was a lot of chatter about ring sizes before, during and after the event. I think the FFA-scaled ring is best for tournaments right now because it balances kiting better, emphasizes maneuvering over speed, and gives some advantages to splitting and multi-ship builds. Maybe I'm just partial to the play style, but I think the tournament will be better this way.
Kiters have the most advantage at the beginning of the game when they have the most room to maneuver, diminishing over the course of the game. Kiters should be balanced by giving them just enough time to get an advantage before their fragility becomes an issue. Given the standard team vs. team ring, even a "lazy kiter" can be successful. An example of a "lazy kiter" is a missile wall with only forward and reverse thrust. It eases into maximum/auto-fire range and then the pilot can practically go AFK until enough weapons are destroyed to close in. A more demanding style of kiting is circle-kiting, staying in the ring while keeping the opponent at arms length. This is still viable in the small ring, especially when executed with multiple ships. In the June tournament coolroco demonstrated a build that could circle-kite and required a good amount of control to be successful.
With "lazy kiting" deterred, a partner theme is that raw speed shouldn't have such a big advantage over maneuverability. Designing a ship with an extremely high ratio of forward thrust can be very effective in the standard ring because it has so much room to ram ships out of position and pick them off. Maneuverable ships get a chance to dodge the ramming attacks, but it's an awkward game to "bull fight" for the first seven minutes and not very interesting to watch. The smaller ring gives rushers less room to stomp in and requires more finesse. It also opens the door for slower, tankier ships (e.g. with railguns) to anchor positions without being left out of the fight.
With the biggest offenders of a large ring deterred by the small ring, multi-ship and splitter builds are now more viable. Where a lazy kiter would smash them down one by one, the multi-ship build can hold a ship in reserve while the others rush the kiter. Where a raw speed rusher would ram the ships one by one and push them far from the center, the rusher has less room to push before it needs to deal with chasers. Multiple ships get a chance to surround and gain positional advantage over a single ship or make sacrifices to push them out of the ring.
All these things considered, the smaller ring turns tournament Cosmo into a game less about building a wall/triangle of weapons/thrusters and more about ship control and command. This is what I like to see.