Firstly, no game becomes an e-sport without a massive casual player base.
We have a super small player base. Trying to make TB an "esport" is never going to happen.

I certainly want some competitiveness to the game but let's not go down the Esport discussion path. There are more than enough reasons why TB will never be an esport within the game itself not even talking about the playerbase.

The reason why TB doesn't keep players isn't because "People want esports", it's because of the nature of this game. Only a few people want to grind a game like this enough to be so good at it that it starts to be viable to compete in.
A game where you have to play a thousand games before there is enough skill involved to even have a resemblance of competition, is a bit hard to make into a popular one.

It's an old game that will die almost completely in the next few years. Let's keep making it better and implement these good ideas. But let's also not have grand delusions of bringing thousands of people into the game because of a good matchmaking system.