I keep seeing a lot of talk about changing the 4-game format and I felt I should talk about it a bit as well since I have had to go through it myself for CC1 Y3 to make it to PL myself.
To start off, YES, a 4 game series is bad and YES it should be changed, but I think only for QUARTERS onward.
Day 1 is already a slog to go through due to all the time both playing the game and waiting between them. To add even more would seem quite unreasonable to me for the already extended amount of time people are playing and operating PLQ's. I understand that many of the most competitive players (including myself at the time) are used to longer days and sessions anyway, but that doesn't equate to having to run a tournament even further into the evening/night when it's already going on for 6-7 hrs straight with little to no breaks.
Now something I want to say real quick, THE FORMAT IS NOT THE REASON YOU DID NOT QUALIFY.
Many of the teams you are in the first 3 rounds with are not good. Yes, they can be fine mechanically but as a proper team, they make many mistakes that can easily cost them their tourney run. There is a reason these teams are with you here competing, they lack some amount of team chemistry, mechanics, experience, general game knowledge, macro, micro, fighting, etc... And yes this includes YOUR TEAM.
To mitigate many of the early-round problems that we would have as a team in CC/PLQ's we would have a modified version of our own playstyle and it helped us keep pace throughout the day and made us more flexible to the RNG of the lobbies and rings we were given. If you watch any of the top teams who qualify through any CC/PLQ I can bet you most of them do not play the same in day 1 as they do in day 2 onward. I would recommend trying to figure out how best you could do that for yourself as a top team if you think you are one.
Now before anyone says anything, I understand that the meta has changed and people have gotten better, but it is not to the point where the best and top teams would lose out to them even in a 4 Game series.
Check your ego, figure out what went wrong, watch others, watch yourself, and figure out exactly how you and your team fucked up. YOU are the reason you did not qualify and that is fine, failure is inevitable, but you should always try to learn from it.