Does anyone have knowledge or can direct me to a link of the formats used in other states?
If you go to hsquizbowl you can glean enough information there about what formats are used on a national scale (psst - your team played them at MST Fall and WUHSAC). Suffice it to say, in many of the most active regions of the country (all of the Southeast, including Georgia where the coaches got so angry about being taken over by an athletic organization for one year in the 90s that they flooded the office with paperwork until the organization gave up and let them go, Minnesota, California, Michigan, D.C. and Maryland, Texas, Pennsylvania), there simply is no athletic organization that has quizbowl in their purview.
The 2 semi-notable exceptions to this are Virginia, where VHSL has run a poor quality state tournament that marginally improved with Shawn Pickrell writing, and Illinois where the IHSA runs state. However, in Virginia a very important defining feature of their circuit is that VHSL has none of the draconian restrictions of MSHSAA - teams can travel as much as they want, can attend as many tournaments as they want, attend any KIND of tournament they want, and don't have to go through miles of paperwork to try and get state approval for things. In the same vein, the Virginia format is not used ANYWHERE outside of districts, regionals, state, and conferences that I understand aren't played by dedicated teams mostly. Unlike in Missouri, the vast majority of the circuit isn't some kind of outgrowth of their state format - instead all of the active teams regularly attend events on more standard formats by other writers. A Virginia insider just informed me that this season alone there are going to be 6 tournaments using HSAPQ, at least 2 NAQT tournaments, and 8 events that were housewrites or mirrors that were pyramidal and I think all used the 20/20, non-computational ACF format. Also bear in mind, especially with the NAQT numbers, that there are lots of tournaments right outside of the state border that are also very good that lots of Virginia teams attend. In summary for Virginia, the reason their circuit has had all kinds of ability to thrive is not because a state organization took over, but because the organization never clamped down on them and all of the teams that actually cared about being good at quizbowl decided to ignore VHSL and instead prepare for everything else like nationals (some teams have been known to have so little regard for VHSL districts that they send their B team to play it while their A team goes out of town for a better tournament). None of these features play into Missouri's favor, making our state a huge morass comparatively.
In Illinois, their system is far less successful, but even there there are some improvements to what goes on in Missouri. IHSA lets schools attend college events, and through some loopholes in their rules, allows teams to attend more quizbowl tournaments than they are supposed to have dates for. IHSA has also in recent years attempted at a system of producing what are supposed to be regular pyramidal questions, although that has been poorly run given the fact the state just turned it into a dumb bureaucratic process without a central editor who knows what to do. The format is also standard tossup and bonus (20/20 most of the time) However, there are still very big problems - lots of computation, lots of weird distribution, an awful bonus format, and lots of coaches who do not want change. Something that is amazingly consistent is that every time an Illinois team does well on pyramidal questions is not pleased with everything else. There are lots of very bad tournaments in Illinois, but there are now enough ticked off schools that there is a season's worth of good events that all the top teams go to, along with maybe some college stuff, and teams work towards nationals there. All of the defining features that make both VHSL and IHSA improvements to varying degrees are that the top teams have decided they have something more important to care about, and have some degree of freedom to pursue those things with a full schedule. Missouri has neither of these characteristics yet, and tons of things working against it to get these things to fall in place. You and the folks at MSHSAA may not believe it, but this really is not how it's done in other states AT ALL, and I'm not sure it's really understood by some people here that this state is truly a national laughingstock.
Speaking of hsquizbowl, I am still most interested in seeing that proposed post defending math computation to the whole country.
Ripping companies on message boards does not help improve our chances of receiving such bids.
A currently active student I talked to made the point that I think bears repeating about this comment, namely that the companies being ripped are pretty much the ones that are bad for quizbowl in the first place. The reason Questions Galore and Avery have been so widely panned is not because people are ungrateful, but because they routinely produce questions that are far below the standards of quality that students should have the right to expect. The writers that ARE wanted to write the state contract by a vocal group of people - NAQT or HSAPQ - will in all likelihood never bid until the whole format is overhauled, creating a vicious cycle where the only people who bid are the bad writers who are impervious to being ripped, which are certainly the worst kind.