Fights versus looters actually take around couple seconds because auto-resolving them is completely safe.
What TW was thinking with this change to the tournaments is beyond me. Economy right now is completely broken, sure, but none of the economy problems were caused by tournaments, they were actually a huge risk for a low level character and reward rarely was worth the time investment anyway. But instead of addressing real issues with tournaments they just made them not worth doing at all, which will result in less feedback on them. Fix challengers wearing their own armor. Fix 1v1 AI abuse. Fix spear+shield duels. Fix rewards being useless for mid-lategame characters.
Fix tournaments as a whole first, balance the rewards later.