[@Double]
Well that was emotional. :) 

And yes, I agree with you that in general one on one deathmatches are stupid from an in universe perspective. Like seriously, just gang up on people. It's fun. And we shall totally do it. Well the two of us at least. We seem to be on the same page. I don't know what the rest are going to be up to.

This being said I do understand the reasoning for the artistic choice made to go that way. And honestly I think that going the way they did was the right thing to do from a purely artistic perspective. Put simply, the reason the fights in Dragonball are always so awesome is because they aren't just fights, they are stories. Each fight is choreographed and designed into detail to tell a story about the two characters and the conflict involved. It's an epic in the ancient meaning of the word played out through violence. And that's just that much easier to do when you have just two characters to focus on. And I feel they did a good enough job that I can forgive just about anything because of it.

This said, I stopped watching the show when my local TV channels stopped airing it. And that was back when GT ended. So I missed the whole multiple universes thing entirely. I got DB, DBZ, the androids and GT as well as the one standalone movie when Goku becomes a Super Sayan God because of course he does. But that's it.