All tournaments for both good and ill are often decided by what games they get. No matter how polished or unpolished the final product is, the thing that decides your legacy isn’t necessarily how good or bad a job you did as a production company (the only cases in which it might I think is if it’s extremely bad or extremely good), but how lucky you are to get the super epic game on your stage.
This is basically what happened to the first NASL. It’s one of those things where I don’t know if it was unforced errors, but NASL certainly had delays and tech issues they couldn’t deal with, but lucked out with a great finals between Puma and MC.
In the organizers of Canada Cup’s case, they’ve always been good (at least by FGC standards), and they’ve run multiple games and finals year after year. But for me they are always defined by the Canada Cup 2014 USF4 finals between Pepeday and Poongko. It had everything, back when Poongko believed he could go super saiyan by taking his shirt off, insanely aggressive styles of play from both characters, and off the wall casting. If you haven’t watched it, it’s worth it to go back. I’d say it’s among the best series played in Street Fighter 4 history across all iterations.