As I posted in the Tyranid thread, I've really been impressed with the evolution of White Dwarf Battle Reports such that GW is really walking the walk when it comes to Forging a Narrative. The report scenarios area always unique and usually custom to armies and table setup, unless they are deliberately showing off a book scenario.
(minor spoilers if you haven't read this month's report)
In this month's report the two armies not only have no Troops selections, but also have completely different Victory Conditions. The Tau have to kill the 3 Hive Tyrants, while the Tyranids have to destroy 3 "Generators" that are terrain markers the Tau army has. This created a really compelling game as the Tau needed to be offensive against the HTs, but also protective of the Generators. Meanwhile, the bugs needed to go after the Generators, while protecting their HTs. The Tau could sacrifice everything to get their job done, while the bugs had to protect 3 of their most killy units (including the Swarmlord). Also, the bugs got a free random reinforcement each time they destroyed a Generator, so the Tau couldn't just protect one and sacrifice the others.
Okay, with all the description out of the way, it seems to me this sort of scenario is much better way to create a fun and level-set tournament experience than using Comp restrictions. Imagine a scenario where you simply couldn't field any Elite choices (or whatever)? And imagine having all the scenarios to study before the tournament, but not knowing which Victory Condition you will need to accomplish until the game setup for that round?
Another interesting scenario setup I've been reading recently is the way Malifaux 2.0 works. Each side gets a unique overall objective, which you can keep secret or tell your opponent during setup to receive more VPs at the end for accomplishing it. Each player can also select a number of "schemes" that are essentially like 40K's Secondary Objectives, that can also be kept secret or announced for more VPs. Imagine if before each game you could choose to take First Blood, Slay the Warlord, or whatever. More fun, of course, would be ditching those standard options and having a selection to choose from that was army specific. For example, the tournament could publish a set of 6 Secondary Objectives for each army (Tau, SMs, Eldar, etc.) and before each game, a player can choose a number of them, say 3. This way the player could choose ones that mitigate army list weaknesses for the particular scenario (like not being able to use his Elites!). Perhaps a player could even volunteer to sideboard a unit to gain an additional Objective. He could put an HQ out of the game and gain an Objective worth +2 VPs, or something like that.
I believe that creating scenarios and VCs like this benefits all types of players. Competitive players can enjoy the challenge of crafting a list to master all those variables, while other players can simply enjoy Forging a Narrative.
TL; DR:
There are a lot of exciting options for scenarios and objectives that could help balance "comp" much better and more interestingly than blanket restrictions.