Yes, I also believe that the number of participants can affect the quality of the world cup, not to the detriment of other teams, but unfortunately if a country has not participated in previous world cups, it means that it has neither the capacity nor the quality to be a eligible team to participate in the world cup.
I imagine that the main reason the world cup is such a rare and prestigious event is because it takes place every 4 years.
I don't agree. According to the most probable system, the teams that qualify for the knock out stages will play one additional match only, while they could face weaker teams in the group stages. Therefore, their performance won't change a lot in my opinion. On the other hand, increasing the number will give more opportunities for the theoretically weak teams and their fans to appear in the World Cup. However, the decision to increase the number of participants was taken for pure financial reasons.
Yes, i agree with you! I have no doubt that this change in the next World Cup has financial vision as one of the main objectives, because consequently the country that will host the World Cup will receive many tourists from all over the world, this will help the economy and in a way directly or even indirectly a greater investment in football.
Talking about the system of the next world cup, to be honest, it hasn't been released yet, so we don't have a concrete answer regarding that. I believe the system will be released later this year.
What was commented is that it could have 16 groups with 3 teams or 12 groups with 4 teams.
If we use that example, we would have 80 games.
If we follow the analogy I said just above, each team will not play an additional game but one less game in the group stage (compared to the old system of previous world cups), because this will compensate the additional stage.
And as incredible as it may seem, the world cup in this new format, if memory serves me correctly, could be held in 32 days.
ps: by the way, my superficial knowledge about this topic is, there will be a great chance that we will have 12 groups with 4 teams each in the next world cup.