Locked hospital doors seem to be widely hated...

I despise the door penalty. I have always hated this mechanic. I have encountered it in other games before. They were FPS games, and I ended up not playing them because it was a central mechanic of the game. I played team combat games where you were allowed back into the action immediately, and they didn't suffer any undue balance issues because of it.

It sounds from ZM's history on the matter that this was probably designed heavily around the BAF's map structure. The BAF hospital is right there, within a super-powered hop/skip/jump from the furthest possible combat zone. Designing in a penalty also has relevance to outdoor phases of the Lambda trial, which also allows fairly immediate return to combat.

Beyond that, I think someone among the devs had a pointy stick somewhere dirty that they felt an additional defeat penalty is necessary than the loss of time spent in the action. Traveling back into the depths of Lambda's collection phase is plenty of time penalty. Even with the hospital teleporter system in the UGT, if your league has moved deeper into the current map section you have to run through the map to catch up to them, and in some sections, that's not a trivial amount of running around.

Lets not forget that these trials are possibly the deadliest CoH/V content ever made with the possible exception of the AV fights in the RSF and STF. They are radically deadly by design, where the AV fights are replete with unresistable damage, multi-hundred mag mezzes, and effects that remove fixed percentages of your health in steps designed specifically to kill you if you don't get healed. The non-AV content is overloaded with boss and EB rank critters, mostly picked from some of the most dangerous critter factions yet presented to us - critters who are well stocked with "exotic" damage types, uncommonly resisted mez effects, and various dangerous debuffs. In short, it's meant to kill you fast and frequently unless you're buffed to the gills and paying attention.

I'm not afraid of these challenges. I don't dislike them. I'm usually buffed to the gills, and I usually pay attention. I've seen, though, what they can do to some people's characters. The challenge level of the iTrials can mean those people spend a lot of time in the hospital. If I end up on a league of too many of these people, I can spend a lot of time in the hospital too - having a lot of experience and a tricked out character only means so much if the league keeps dying, leaving you alone facing something meant for 10+ people. Spending time traveling back to a fight is not particularly exciting. Spending additional time just waiting to leave the hospital before even getting to travel back is just plain frustrating.

I'm glad they didn't implement the other ideas they had for how to do this, because they sound spectacularly awful. That doesn't mean that I have to like what they did give us.