Ship It, Fish!

regarding weak players in a FreeRoll vs Skilled players in the buy-in MTT the free roll probably has a very top heavy payout which might cancel out you expected increase in EV due to the skill gap.

Yes, it is top-heavy which I really thought was actually good for the skilled players. Once we get to the cash level, people are going to be playing really tight weak to make the $32 of the first payouts. I don't care about winning $32, I'll be wanting to accumulate chips and shoot for $1,500. That's the best spot for a skilled player in a tourney in my view.

Another question to consider, is it either a freeroll or turn in the medal for the $216 token? or do you have to pass up multiple FRs for one token?

It's certainly not either/or, it's more of a question of whether you should try to get medals faster by forgoing freerolls and therefore over the long haul getting more $216 or other tokens.

also, look at your hourly rate. If it's 5000 players in a free roll that pays the top 50 players, you'll have to play atleast five hours just to barely cash

Yeah, I thought about hourly rate considerations a bit, but my feeling is that I'll play the first few hours on semi-auto-pilot while holding open two cash game windows. My EV goes down a bit in the tourney, but the early stages of such a freeroll should mostly be easy-to-read players that don't require my full concentration. So, I'm basically trying to win the card race early on (like you can bluff and blind-steal much against a weak freeroll field anyway), get enough chips to be a contender to cash by mid-tourney, and then turn my focus. So, it's more of a “no real time commitment unless I get near to cashing”

Indeed, I find tourneys so freaking frustrating most of the time that I'd feel better if it was just a freeroll that I bust out on with KK vs. AQ. If I'd spent a bunch of medals that could have been used to get me closer to a plasma TV or somesuch, I'd probably get annoyed. :)