WARHURYEAHI don't think having bigger lans with bigger prize pools is going to help things, I'd rather see a heavier focus on making leagues a lot more healthy which will in turn spawn more regular high quality content, help teams stick together for longer and give newer teams and players more motivation to improve.
You are not completely wrong about that, but no matter what you do: people will always quit after LAN. Personally, I never played TF2 on LAN, but it's always the same: players come home from an i-series, some of them quit because they don't enjoy online TF2 anymore and because the next international LAN is one year away. Also, the prizepool is extremely low and you barely make plus considering travel expenses. The league quality drops. Now sometimes theres continental LANs but they usually end up an one-sided roll (the last two were the exception in this case)
A biannual international LAN would be a good solution, atleast for the pros. They can play the LANs, and play the next season and play the next LAN after it right away. Right now theres 2 seasons inbetween i61 and people don't bother sticking around for that long. Sometimes there's 1 or 2 old veterans returning for a LAN, but they're often gone again right away.