Your stats and rank from ptr does not carry over. Good luck this season!

I doubt the site will have any significant changes to format. Enigma is the developer for this site, and has maintained teamfortress.tv for a long ass time, which uses the same format. Of course there are pros and cons to the current format, and one of the biggest issues is how easily it is to shut people's ideas down, but I think that if moderation is more active than it was on teamfortress.tv this wont be too big of an issue.
The bottom line is that this format, while not perfect, has been proven to work decently.