On discord, it came up that running tournaments is hard work and should have some implied reward. I think the current ruleset would actually allow for theses based on tournaments - game design is hard, and a set of regulations for a subgame, played and debugged through peer review, would almost certainly meet currently thesis standards. But maybe it's worth explicitly including?
Amend Rule 2464 (Tournaments) by appending the following paragraph: People are ENCOURAGED to consider original, playtested tournament regulations as being a worthy core subject for a thesis.