CoH invitations should always be made based on merit IMO. Speaking as a four-time host, the ideal situation is to include the very best RPers you can. For a host, I feel, the measure of success is in how the tournament is RPed. Now, people's criteria for inclusion will always be different, and that's OK; we're not all automatons after all.
Same goes for puppets. There is certainly a case to be made for only inviting one nation per user, though it should not, in my opinion, be a hard and fast rule. Back when I last hosted (CoH64, with Queb), we made a longlist of those who met our qualifying criteria, then had a good long debate on who got the invites. The question of a puppet came up - HopNation and Timbermunich - and we decided, as we had more names on our list than we needed, to only invite one. In this case, we went with the puppet as we felt the RPing was of a higher quality from that account than the main. As it turned out, it was a moot point anyway as the invitation was declined.
Point is, basically, I'll stand by the decision of any host to include or exclude a second nation from a user to the CoH so long as it's based on sound logic. It's their baby, after all.
