With regard to demand, you're almost certainly correct. As for the timing of getting into the lottery (as a newbie) under the current "select-a-seat" system, I don't know off the top of my head. Anyone?
It used to be the answer to this question was May, with the drawing occurring in June. But for the past two tournaments we've been selecting seats in October.
No. If you take a year off, you don't earn that year's priority point. But you do retain the points previously earned. So anyone with at least one priority point will be ahead of 2015 newbies, whether the priority holder attended in Philly or not. Put another way, each tournament can shuffle the rank order within the group of priority holders, but it doesn't create "opportunities for new blood." At the bottom of the ladder, what matters is the number of priority holders who actually exercise their option to purchase tickets through the system -- or not.
There probably won't be a "release" per se. I expect that the lottery will exhaust the supply of available tickets in Boston. Back in 2004, probably half the applicants to Boston's lottery were rejected. Some newbies did get into the building through the general lottery. My guess is that will be the case again, and that 2015 will mark the return of a real two stage lottery -- with applicants being rejected at both stages. Now that's not a certainty, as the NCAA reserves the right to tweak the system at any time. But as far as I know, the two stage lottery has never been officially scrapped. It's just that the distinction between the two stages has been mostly irrelevant since 2010, when the tournament stopped selling out at the lottery stage.
Back in the day, we used to talk about the "bubble level" in each lottery. In other words, the number of priority points needed to be 100% assured of getting seats would be one step above the bubble level. At the bubble level, some applicants got seats in the priority lottery, some did not. Below the bubble, everyone was relegated to the general lottery, along with the newbies.
After each tournament, I posted a detailed Summary of the Seat Assignments for that year. The "dataset" consisted of dozens of reports of seat locations, paired with that poster's priority level. Maybe that Summary will make a cameo appearance in 2015.
Or, maybe not. It's a different world for FF tickets now. The speculators are long gone. The big question for next year is whether those holding long dormant priority will jump back into the lottery system. I suspect a significant number will. Then again, even 2011 St. Paul didn't sell out until the last minute. So there is considerable uncertainty here.
Final aside: It feels really strange to refer to 2009 and the years immediately prior as "back in the day."
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