Sad thing is, I told them so.
For anyone who was on the closed beta PTS, you might remember my controversial and eventually locked thread titled "Stealing Emperor and Cheating the System."
The post was about how a player intentionally exploited the point system and the campaign reset to jump a dramatic number of points in minutes and nab Emperorship from those who had actually earned it.
ZOS assured us that they were paying attention to the feedback, but it went 100% ignored.
I agree with some points here, and disagree with others.
First and foremost, the Emperorship isn't supposed to be "accessible" to many. Emperors and past-Emperors are meant to be rare. I do not want to see every Tom, *** and Harry as "past Emperors." In fact, we have a serious issue right now with Emperor-farming, specifically because people want access to the Emperor skill line.
So no, I do not want to see even 20% of the PvP population with the "past Emperor" tag.
I would submit that there really should be more criteria than "who has the most AP?" when it comes to Emperorship. I'd much rather see someone crowned Emperor who goes out of their way to unite their faction on their campaign - meaning they don't run in a small, exclusive group but rather run in the larger groups, than I would someone who has the most AP. What would be very cool - though I doubt it's possible - would be some sort of pop-up that appeared when all the keeps were taken, that allowed all faction members online 2 minutes to place a vote for any one of the top 5 AP of their faction or something. This would mean that a high-AP player who was a jerk would be less likely to become Emperor than perhaps the #3 on the list who treated the players of his/her faction with respect and tried to be inclusive when it came to forming raids, etc.