But we've never had average crowds anywhere near 17K, even when we were good. Is this just realism? Should we be spending £16M to cater for the fans that only turn up for the big games (and sometimes not even then)? With the nation's league, there are going to be few friendlies and the opportunity to host a Scotland game is extremely limited (maybe once every five years?). Unless we were looking at 30K seats, there is no reason to hold Scotland games at a new pittodrie over tynecastle or Easter road. We definitely shouldn't be including that measure in our decision making. I also doubt that Elton John will be refusing a gig because of the extra 3K either, he'll either play in Aberdeen or not, and that occurs once a decade (and fuck that anyway). In both situations, we'd be paid for ground rental rather than ticket sales anyway.
I get the concern about being season ticket focused, but I don't think that you're point about waiting until a Friday is an issue. Most people will know whether or not they can go to a game in advance (I'll hand my ticket to my mate if I'm not going to be at the next game for example - before QR codes of course!) and will likely want to cash in on selling their ticket early. There's an offset there. However, the biggest problem I envisage that I hadn't considered until your post was not necessarily that people can't afford a ticket, but that those who can afford tickets but don't usually buy a season ticket will buy one so that they can go to the bigger games. The option to formally sell your unused ticket, coupled with scarcity, creates an apartheid between those who can afford to buy, say, 4 tickets and those that want to go to the majority of games but can't afford a season ticket. It returns a situation a lot like the DNA points scam. I could simply buy a ticket for a decent seat and sell it every week until a big game and then go to that. I'd like to see a way to counteract that so we can prioritise fans going to games (say if you attend <12 games per season you can only buy a half season ticket or some such). It's a difficult balance between forcing scarcity to get bigger crowds and being realistic as to our average crowds. I think 16K will result in too scarce a product, but 17K might produce the happy spot of having lots of unsold tickets regularly. For some weird reason, I'd feel happier if it was 18K. I can quite believe the £16M figure, you're talking an entire deck the length of the South to get an extra 4,000 seats. It's not a small thing. A sheet of OSB is around £1M today.
I don't think it'll actually go ahead any time soon anyway. Maybe the reduced capacity is just to butter us up for a reduced capacity pittodrie when this latest idea gets booted out.