Fencer:

"the ideal form of the last rounds should be 1-4 3-2 or 1-8 5-4 3-6 7-2."

This is from the notes blog, and has been in practice from quite some time, but I have never thought it made any sense. You can have the top players meet in the final round (in theory), but why should the second-highest rated player get the bottom slot? Rather, it could be:

1-3 2-4 or 1-4 2-3 for 4 players, and
1-5 3-7 2-6 4-8,

which would still permit the top two seeds to meet in the "finale"