This was my 3rd WS, having attended Ecuador in 2005 and Bali in 2008. It is very easy to focus on the negatives at this match, as there were so many and they really stand out, but there were also a lot of good things about the match.
Permits and Entering/Exiting:
This was probably the worst of the WS I have attended. Yes, getting dragged off the plane and being "detained" in Hong Kong while traveling to Bali was very very bad, but the trials and tribulations of traveling in Greece were overall worse. When I arrived in Athens, I saw a number of people who missed connecting flights onto Rhodes because the permit verification was very slow or because their bags were pulled aside and airport personnel couldn't find them for hours. Exiting, I spent an hour in Rhodes waiting in line to retrieve a piece of paper that I needed so I could stand in line in Athens. It is clear that customs had no idea what they were doing and there were no match representatives there to advise competitors or customs officials about what needed to get done.
Waiting:
Registration was a disaster. Registration opened at 9am and you needed to register in order to get your competitor card to catch the 10:30 bus out to the range for the equipment check. Unfortunately, registration took 3 hours to do, and consisted of standing in line for 2 hours so you could say your name and they could confirm your division and give you your ID card. The remaining hour was spent having to retake your picture because they said the pictures we sent back in July "didn't turn out" and needed to be redone (why not simply have us resend pictures back in August/September instead?)
Combine that with some of the Europeans who simply butt in line and the experience was extremely frustrating. I personally blame the hordes standing around for 3 hours as probably ground zero for the spread of the "plague" that hit so many people.
Stages:
Better design than in Bali, but there were only 30 stages here as opposed to 36 in Ecuador and 35 in Bali. The stages were sacrificed in favor of adding more competitors (ie more money). This gave everybody 1 day off in a 6 day match (shoot for 5 half days) as opposed to the previous world shoots that had 6 half days. Was the match difficult? Yes, but it's the World Championships, it should be difficult.
Officiating:
A few officials were just horrible. Unfortunately, for some reason, they were rotating officials through some of the stages, so we had the same bad official on 3 different stages. Many of the problems are probably petty and not that big in the grand scheme of things, but at a World level match, you expect better...
At one point, a shooter on our squad challenged a target. The RO clearly had a poor attitude and made a big show of pulling out his ONE overlay. The shooter disagreed with the call and asked that the target be pulled. While the target was pulled, the RO left the next shooter standing on the line and waited for the CRO to arrive rather than keep the stage moving. The CRO spent a great deal of time looking at the target but eventually resorted to using a strip of paster backing as a "straight edge" to try and figure out where the line was.
At another point, I was the on deck shooter. The previous on deck shooter went onto the stage, and I took my place exactly where he had been standing to wait my turn. The RO got annoyed at me for "not standing in the right place" and made me take 2 steps to my right.
During one stage briefing, we had a Brazilian RO reading out the stage briefing. Her associate on the stage kept interrupting her to repeat exactly what she had just said.
Really, really long pauses before the start signal, on the order of 6+ seconds. It happened to me twice; I didn't pay much attention to how many times it happened to others.
These are only things that I witnessed/experienced first hand. I heard a lot of other believable stories that I won't repeat here.
Range Amenities:
They had people on the range during the day regularly washing the bathrooms! Every bay had lots of shelter and shade and enough seats for your squad. The vendor tent was very nice and the food area was well stocked. Water and coolers on the ranges for competitors would have been nice, but with the number of people sick, I doubt people would want to risk leaving their water / gatorade bottles in a communal cooler and risk taking out the wrong one...
Disease:
I got sick on the first day with cold/flu as did many of the other competitors. It was an epidemic and I would estimate that a quarter of the match officials and competitors were sick to varying degrees throughout the match. It wasn't just the competitors, but other guests at the hotels. I heard people hacking and coughing all throughout the day on the shuttle buses, in the hotels and restaurants. The pharmacist at the drug store near the match hotel told me that she was almost completely sold out of cold and flu remedy, and had sold out of some items. Even worse for her, she had to explain the dosage for each drug because all of the instructions were in Greek.
Walkthroughs:
Very tight, with 16+ people per squad and only 3 minutes to inspect the stage; You were not allowed on the stages except during your designated times, either. One suggestion I had for the next World's was maybe to have a "team manager" selected who would shoot the prematch and wear a hat camera during their inspection time and during their stage. We could have a team night where we're briefed on where targets are on the stage, which ones become visible from where, etc....