Personally, I would go back to the prior version and then adust for the small thing that can add to its difficulty, without using items that make it harder as you progress, such as adding an expansion or completing a chapter.
There never was an old spire formula, we already noticed the issues when the spire was introduced and were afraid the next step would be the tournaments, they said there were no plans for that, wel a year leater our fear became reality.
I have said before the best way to balance spire tournaments now and in the future would be with "invisible values" tied to mandatory research.
The developers can then use the game data to set target points for each chapter and then divide the required points for that chapter on the reseach.
If the game data shows that a certain chapter over or underperforms on average they can simply adjust the hidden values to bring it back into line.
My main gripe with this solution is that you need people that can analyse the data properly. as we have seen the current people have no clue how to do a proper job analysing data.
A main example is that the comment that people with more wonders outperform those with fewer shortly after the introduction of this mightmare in the tournaments. while I am sure it's true, they never asked themselves why is that? is that;
a. because the formula is no issue?
b. because those players on average are the tournament tigers, have therefore build up there wonders more and because of that is a more active tournament group by default and therefore screw the short term data?
If you never asked yourself why something is like the way it is, never look at the underlying data and just look at data with a biased perception and look at the parts you like. then you will never be able to properly analyse data anyway.
Like al the comments about the trash the formula is coming from thin air. and sure it takes time for the metagame to change. just because you changed the rules doesn't mean how the game is played changes overnight.
Just like the moonstone library, it was obvious day one that building would destroy scroll players, but it wasn't an issue for the first few months, it needed time to escalate into a metagame where it was a nuke of epic proportions. it took these boneheads 2 years to do what we asked day 1.
they ignored our pleas, comments, suggestions, to wait, see it go down the drain, then ignore our solutions because they have better ones, have meetings for another year or so. to come to the conclusion that the 5 minute fix we asked for day one, was by far the best solution.
How could such incompetent people ever be in charge of any kind of balance? its like the blind leading the blind.