Ten years ago*, Constructed Pro Tours were usually pretty well established formats, and the lead time for testing was pretty long. The teams I worked with usually settled on a deck with some weeks to spare, giving us plenty of time to tune sideboards, work on the mana, etc. Given the short lead time Pro Tours have now, that's simply impossible. So while we were largely undecided, most of the team seemed pretty unfazed by that; they had experienced it before. For me, it ran counter to expectations, and it was adding an appreciable amount of stress to the whole thing.Here we are -- short lead time. Three weeks between Dragon's Maze prerelease and PT start time, new cards legal right away instead of staggered by a month, and no previous GPs in block constructed. So instead of just knowing the format from a bunch of previous events, players rely more on guesswork and taste / personal experience to figure their decks out, and Channel Fireball puts three different decks in the top 20.
It might also be true that most of the players on Channel Fireball have jobs, and all of them interrupted their testing to go play Modern at GP Portland a week earlier. "Three weaks for a pro team to break a format" isn't necessarily three weeks of all the players testing decks. I'd be interested to see if more teams start skipping GPs in the weeks before a pro tour.
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