Heroku does it with 7-8, maybe ten people for all events around the world. So do other companies like 10gen. Why not PayPal's developer community staff? What's their problem?
I'm absolutely shocked by your level of naivety. Why do you imagine that Heroku and Paypal are even remotely comparable companies? Do you have any conception of the total volume of transactions that paypal processes? It's millions of transactions and hundreds of millions of dollars per day. That's about 3 to 4 orders of magnitude larger than heroku's business.
Competition is great, and paypal has tons of room for improvement, that's for sure. But I doubt you'll see dramatic differences in the official policy of any major processor with regards to pre-orders. That's a matter of Visa/MC policy, actually. And the reason why paypal adheres so strictly to it is because if you violate Visa/MC policy then it's open season for chargebacks. One reason some of paypal's competitors look better is because they are at a much smaller scale and so don't have to concern themselves as much with the issues paypal is forced to take very seriously. But there's no way that wouldn't change if those processors started seeing transaction volumes on paypal's scale.
Best case scenario is that competition results either in a new top dog with better customer service or drives paypal to improve. But there's no way you're going to have a situation where tens of thousands of dollars suddenly flowing through an account won't result in lots of roadblocks and red tape. Not unless everyone moves to some sort of greymarket system like bitcoin.
