I wasn't joking at all. You have a bunch of spells now, there's no competition from real fighters anymore, you very rarely have people abusing privileges to be in locked locations during stage 1, and with viscosity you can hide pretty well...
It's very fair in comparison to some quests, even. Sometimes somebody says that they are treated badly, but when all are treated equally badly, i don't see an unfairness.
Edit: And i don't see how more fairness would lead to more participants, either. There are no fighters left to participate. You're complaining about how evil we all are, and how unfair HC is... Of course it seems unfair to the one guy trying when he gets treated just like all the others that don't. You run and hide while others play, then you get ported to GoE and suddenly you lose your heads. Ohh, the unfairness, everybody else didn't waste time running, i did, and still we're all here... That's one of the fairness tweaks put in action.
Just go through the announcements. We all won already, and none of us can do anything anymore. We can't even trigger stage 2 to make it quicker. 90% of MD just sits and watches the other 10% 'battling', which, in most cases, is reduced to 'Oh no, you can have the heads, i'll go for first place next time, do what you like'
That's where your participants are. They either have a medal, or don't want to risk coming in second in a real contest, because they know fully well that the field will be a little smaller next time around, and then they can win uncontested.