An 8-10K attendance doesn't necessarily mean an overwhelmed party space. Remember, I attended an 8000-person Worldcon, back in 1984, and L.A.con II did not seem excessively crowded. That's because they had sufficient social space in the form of those Lanai decks. There's no guarantee that every Worldcon can figure out how to make the social aspects of the evening work, but it is at least possible to point at object examples of when it did work.
Actually, based on the crowding I've seen at relatively small Worldcons such as Montreal and Yokohama, if "uncrowded party floors" becomes a higher priority, it's likely that Worldcon is still too large and should be limited to about 2,000 attendees. The memberships would also plummet in price, except that people would then start reselling them for a lot more than what they paid because the demand would exceed supply.
I don't mean to sound sarcastic or as if I'm making light of your concerns. They're quite legitimate, and if we do manage to grow the event back up to where it previously peaked twenty-five years ago, we're going to have to learn to deal with it. Right now we're not in a death spiral, but I think we are in a slow decline.
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Actually, based on the crowding I've seen at relatively small Worldcons such as Montreal and Yokohama, if "uncrowded party floors" becomes a higher priority, it's likely that Worldcon is still too large and should be limited to about 2,000 attendees. The memberships would also plummet in price, except that people would then start reselling them for a lot more than what they paid because the demand would exceed supply.
I don't mean to sound sarcastic or as if I'm making light of your concerns. They're quite legitimate, and if we do manage to grow the event back up to where it previously peaked twenty-five years ago, we're going to have to learn to deal with it. Right now we're not in a death spiral, but I think we are in a slow decline.