I believe the reason this year's elims is lame is because the alliance has managed to lock down and control the chaos elims is supposed to inherently bring about.
If measures were taken to introduce more unpredictability, it might be more fun.
My suggestions will be:
18 teams of 1000 instead of 12 teams of 1500. More teams means more chaos.
Instead of the last team losing a life, 2 out of 3 teams fighting at the bottom loses a life randomly. Each tick could be equally damaging to both alliances, or double the damage to the more unlucky alliance.
Introduce the concept of a team armory. You could add in temps that could be strategically used (of course not by the leaders, but issued by the leaders). There could be 20 of each temps, 1 of each is usable by players in whichever year of their torn life (1-20 years in torn). Potentially add a merit for using items in an elims team armory.
Temps like a sure-banish grenade that banishes a player to the 4th dimension with ma-ol and santa for 5hours, where his only possible method of leaving early is doing a 500 word typocalypse from Christmas town event, and successfully winning rock paper scissor with maol and his 5 cronies in one shot. This temp will likely be used to lock down a top hitter beating down your team or a strong player hosping your own strong players.
Temps (2) like a area of effect bomb that sends 50-100 random players in a team into the hospital. You can have your alliance use it to help your team turtle, or you can use it to send all the active hitters of the team targeting you into the hospital. If your entire team is stuck in the hospital, it could have an added function of extending hospital times for the 50 players that are slated to exit the hospital first.
No offense meant to any existing leaders, ideas were purely suggested to increase unpredictability. Will be nice if other creative players could share how else to make elims more interesting but to the developers a nightmare.
I saw this comment and just wanted to speak up as said spouse. I only got the PI after he renewed the lease for a hundred days. Upon the expiry of both lease, both of us will be moving into my PI since indeed as you have said, there is no point in renting a PI if I have a PI. If you had all the time to go search our stats (from your comments on his frequent trips to Argentina), you could have had seen the jump in my networth when I had actually acquired the PI into my possession...