Players who spend lots of money on the game don't particularly care about tournament rewards - they care about 75% discount on revivals. Players who spend no money or small to moderate amounts of money tend to care about tournament rewards a lot. This is because you rely on the rewards to replenish some of your losses in PvP. Then, along with troop production and little bit of drachma, you can grow your army at a slow, but acceptable pace. If you fight without good rewards it takes too long time to rebuild your losses which puts you (temporarily) out of the game in a sense or you are forced to watch your army slowly shrink away. So, I get your point that the tournaments are meant to be a bonus to playing the game, but it isn't perceived like that by many players for that reason. Instead, it is actually a critical factor in deciding whether to fight or not. This has big implications on game activity.
I couldn't justify taking part in the May PvP because the rewards would not cover enough of my losses.
Here are a few suggestions on PvP tournaments:
1: The reward gap between 2.2x coalition multiplier and other PvP tournaments is too big. What players tend to do is wait for the 2.2x multiplier tournaments, and mostly skip the other PvP tournaments. This is not good for game activity, because those tournaments come around once every 2 weeks only. Please don't reduce the 2.2x coalition multiplier tournament's rewards, but just buff the rewards from the other PvP tournaments a little to make it a bit more feasible to lose units.
2: Why can't we have more options on what type of units we want from the tournament as rewards? Keep the value of rewards the same (on whatever value-metric you prefer), but offer greater variety to players to choose from. For example: about 80% of my stuff is phalanx ... 10% are cretan archers ... and the other 10% are things that I actually build, like swordsman and some cavalry. So, it would be very attractive if I can choose my rewards to fill the gaps I have.
If you do something about points 1 and 2 above, you may see a lot more action, and constantly, in PvP.