honestly i don't like much change at least when it was unnecessary like you said,maybe it is a bit more realsism but this game will stay arcade independent for the quesition about the arena. Player development is incredible fast(would you reduce this in term of realism, i hope not?), we don't pay taxes and have to fight with bancrupt sponsors, other sprong sports team in the area etc.
Especially the arena is running nowadays, in a arcade function normally if you upgrade a arena, you had to build a totally new one so if you don't change this is will be unrealistik indepent from the contribution.
It's definitely a fair point that announcing this while arena sizes cannot be changed anymore is a problem. One of our near-future plans was to allow you to reduce the size of the arena from construction but to give less than a 100% refund for seats (i.e., you'd get the cost of materials back but not the cost of labor).
This makes totally sense, but at least for new changes you should give the victim are chanche to react, their are already punished. Maybe you could let redesign the users their distribution, with your caps and the upper limit of the investet money in the old one - this would even be more realstic, when you move to a new arena this was a fast solution but maybe a working one ... To get further to step too, because if you make it with a time period, you had to wait some season before the last deconstrution of your last changed are finished.
About 1)
it's equal the effect is pretty the same in the end, the soft cap is maybe a bit more sympathic. But with cap and maximum distirbution, why we need different areas still, we go further to abstract "seats". But i would say hard, because you will give a good guideline with it.
3.) I think this would be too confusing, if you sell bleachers as vip lounge because you could label them so, and if it just go down - so you got a VIP place but you put 5 people in who pay the cheapest amount. Also this looks even more like we are going to the "standard" arena.
It's something we would have done at the same time as the other attendance formula changes if we had realized it would be a problem.
For me it always was a logical reaction to it, when this was proposed ... I said it also, and you had the data to calculate if i am right ;)(and i was not the only one) And those calculation ain't that hard, you know the number of maximum fans but get surprised how big the arenas becomes even in the first step(and the prices for the cheaop categories was still high), so why not running some simulations before not let them do from users.