You have plenty of services for live chat, like Steam. We considered making the shoutbox push shouts (Seb even wrote the code) but we decided not to implement it for fear of it becoming spammy and more flamey than it already is. We like our shoutbox, it is almost exactly the same as it was back on hicksi's original fulltimegeeks COH1 livestream list site, which is where this all began.
IMO it is better to err on the safe side, with regards to the delay. Mines can persist on the battelfied for quite some time, and we wouldn't want this new feature mired in a bunch of cheat worries since anybody will be able to obs any automatch game. For custom games, players can set no delay at all if they so choose.
Looking forward to this. Good luck with your first event, Romeo. Disregard the complaints, it's smart to start small! Also, beautiful highlight artwork by Strummingbird