Imagine your next tournament will be draft style, 10 or so players. 3 Rounds in the draft, players picking in order, something like:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Each named is unique within the tournament. If someone else drafts them, they're off the board entirely. Once the draft is done, you get 20 mins to list build before you have the hit the table.

Who are the top 5 pilots you're hoping to pick up?

Who are the pilots you'd expect to be available?

Who fare better, Rebel or Imps?

I would see about expanding it. If you're looking at 10 players, then you're looking at 1000 points. There are 541 points on the rebel side of uniques, and 563 on the imperial side. First off, I would split the draft into rebel and imperial players and have two drafts.

I'm thinking something like 2x rookie/gold/red/etc and then maybe 4x for the tie fighter generics (and have the drafted in a pair maybe?) This puts it at 955 rebels + 1145 imperials. I think it would work better at around 16 people, drafting 800 on each side. The fact that the rebels are at a lower point overall is okay, because thinks like Y and HWKs basically require a turret, which adds another ~50 points overall, putting them at ~1000 vs. ~1150, but the rebels seem to have more upgrade slots as well.

This way, you'll actually start seeing ships and builds that would be "suboptimal." In what you originally suggested, I would suspect whomever drafted Howl would just run a 7 TIE swarm... and likewise if you drafted Han, you'd just add two rookies to run HSF or something. Now you need to draft the rookies as well, which is unlikely to happen, so you might have to improvise!

It wouldn't bother me at all. I'd try to draft Biggs or Howl or something, just to deny other players the use of them, then run BBXX or BBXY, all generics.