The crowded stage will give way to a lot of single-answer responses, yes-or-no questions, and a show-of-hands.
Even with only a half-dozen contenders, they seldom get questions and responses that give much insight to them.
Of course, there will always be the Crowley and Steffie attempts at gotchas for the frontrunner(s).
One solution — if they are not getting double-digits in the basic polls, they don’t need to be on the debate stage.
“attempts at gotchas”
I expect a candidate to be able to handle gotchas with ease.
A favorite of mine is “I’ll talk about that all you want but not right now. There are better ways of spending this debate’s time”