I was just thinking it would be a really cool feature to have a system for automated tournaments similar in format to the Gratuitous Tournament that just ended. Basically the tournament would remain open until 8 or 16 players send in their fleets, then the server would face them off against each other automatically (with no animations), in a best out of 5 replay and results are automatically emailed to each player.
If videos of each match were automatically uploaded to Youtube or some other video site that would be even cooler. 
So you could have multiple tournaments where one person creates a game on the server by opening up a game similar to how multi-player matches are handled in most games. The difference is that you just submit your fleet and let the computer take care of the rest. Obviously the matches should be computed on a remote server as having a player host a tournament makes it way too easy to tamper with the game.
I’m guessing that my idea would not be trivial to implement but it does seem like the next logical step to move from playing individual challenges where you can tailor your fleet to your enemies (too easy) to challenging players to develop generalist fleets that can take on all comers (more interesting).