Just remember that rider times would likely fit some kind of distribution curve heavily weighted towards the cut off times. And a rider like Anco will be in the top 1% - all power to him but the system has to be optimised if it is optimised for the 90%.
If you have access to the data it might be very illuminating to take all the rider times, plot them onto a common finish and then see how that would have grouped the start times (All bearing in mind that the weather this year greatly skewed things). However, even if it shows some possible potential, to make any practical use of that in future you would need riders to have some accurate, and maybe even provable, idea of their probable times. Something which I understand LEL doesn't ask for. Also it would probably show that the start and early controls would have to be open longer even though later controls could open later and for shorter - basically just mirror imaging the current situation.
You'd also have to plan for weather events like this years suddenly throwing everything out. With the current model, at least a lot of out of time riders were able to still complete the course using the control services they had paid for. If it had been the otherway round, we would have taken their money and then shut-up shop whilst several hundred riders were still out of the road.
Alternately, you could take a punt and tell controls that for the expected first X 'elite' rider times they only need to be offering basic services (fruit, flapjack and water), but it will fail if you hit fast elite who planned on having a full meal at halfway because that's what was advertised as on offer so they planned for that and they paid the same as slower riders [remember that, riders have paid for the advertised services so they have a right to expect them to be available even if usually speedy Gonzales only wants an apple].
I could agree that the known elite riders shouldn't be in the first wave - Anco and ilk could have started as late as Tuesday. But I can bet that they wouldn't like it and they would also have to bite their tongues on arriving at controls to find a queue in front of them, even if just a few minutes, for check-in/check-out.
For the control I was at (Great Easton so very late in everything), a brave co-coordinator looking at the weather forecast could have said delay the setup and prep til Tuesday afternoon rather than Monday (and I could have stayed at home to dig up my potatoes), but it would have been a very brave call and wouldn't have saved any money as the venue booking had to be made months earlier.
Could we have coped with almost all the riders hitting us in the same 24-hours. Possibly, if we had known to plan for that since we did actually cope with the majority being weather bunched into a spike that arrived the same night.