If your worry is the weak players who can’t consistently finish games (how common is that?), is that really worse than weak players who make any other kind of big blunder?
For simultaneous McMahon it still doesn’t seem reasonable to disqualify players unless they timeout of all of their games in a round.
Not at all. There are people who just try out go for a couple of weeks and then drop it. Naturally these tend to be weaker players, sinply because few make it to dan in 6 weeks.
Actually, after thinking a bit more, I think my posts so far have missed the real question at hand: what is the root problem this rule is intended to address? Answering that will help us get to an optimal rule.
What I’m trying to say is: timeouts themselves are not actually the problem. They are no worse than resigning with one minute remaining, and no one would suggest disqualification for letting the time run low like that. The root problem is inactive players abandoning the tournament without clicking the “leave the tournament” button; timeouts, long-running tournaments, and dull later rounds without active players are the symptoms.
Unfortunately there’s no way to measure that directly. So we have to use a proxy – like timeouts, which does a decent-ish job. But, like all proxies, it’s imperfect, and rigidly designing a ruleset for the proxy instead of the root issue will inevitably result in occasional false positives.
That’s why I think there should be alternatives like a first strike (with a warning) or a button to rejoin (possibly with constraints, or requiring director approval).
Rejoin button would be fine. But you need to program that, problem too small to care.
I’d be happy to implement this myself if everyone agrees on it as a solution. It’s been a while since I’ve used Typescript or React but shouldn’t been too hard to figure out.
I think it should be on the TD to bring people back. It should be more obvious that time out disqualifies.
Actually, I usually have the opposite problem, people who have timed out and disqualified holding up the whole round. 
I agree that a rejoin button would correctly solve the problem of inactive players.
Hi, I ike the idea, that the TDs could decide, if they want to overrule the general rule set, and bring people back to the tournament, when they were disqualified due to a timeout.
Disadvantage: If TD is not longer available, there is no possibility to get back.