I would guess there are diminishing returns to opening the entire stadium. Regardless of whether or not you trust GTAA to make the best decisions, especially monetarily, MBS and Chick Fil A have zero incentive to not try to make as much profit as possible.
In 2018 GT sold 50k tickets to the Clemson game. The reduced capacity setup at MBS has 42k seats. I’m sure MBS, GTAA, CFA, and anyone else involved ran the numbers are saw that the extra 8-15k tickets they may sell would not be worth the operating costs of opening the upper deck.
It also
does limit the amount of orange in the crowd, and GT is still turning a larger profit than if the game was played at BDS. At least we’ll have 1 sold out home game this year
. Maybe Ole Miss will bring enough folks out of the woodwork to get 2
Also for reference re: the Monday Night Labor Day game; Ole Miss vs. Louisville last year only sold 30k tickets. And that was both teams’ full capacity game since 2019