Hmm.... I think our traffic counts during Northern Migration were about 250 - 300 movements over a 4 hour period. I'm pretty sure MSP (RW) averages about 60 an hour during a bank. Believe it or not, sometimes we do see traffic up in lowly MSP.
That many? Impressive! Miami recently enjoyed the experience of having our Cross The Gulf event generate that kind of traffic. What a blast! I missed it so I was curious to ask what you believe it was that attracted traffic like that? I wish I had seen that one.
For our success on Cross The Gulf, I attribute much of it to being a shorter version of the hugely popular Cross The Pond events. Our events guy went a long way to make it this way. His phenomenal job of organizing and advertising it was crucial.
I also attribute a large amount of it's success to the 200 or so pages of procedures, airspace delegation maps, vectoring diagrams, and position briefings that were used to control the airspace. Without them we would not have been able to have 9-10 TRACON controllers, 6-7 CAB controllers, and 8 or so Center controllers working together as a team. Someone coined it as organized chaos. This, in my eyes made the airspace very attractive. As a result we had many arrivals and departures to and from other areas. That got us some of the 2-way traffic we all dream about. Also since we were using simultaneous approaches to the field, many pilots experienced looking out the windows to see another aircraft directly beside them on the adjacent approach. Both talking to different controllers. Some call that the coolest thing that can happen on the network. I would agree. Very satisfying to a controller as well. When you do stuff like that right it is "as real as it gets". What a high...
Say what you want about SOP's with large page counts that are very detailed. There is no way you can convince me that you can have that many controllers working side by side without having some very detailed procedures. You can't have that many VATSIMmers "organized" in the same place at the same time without detailed procedures.
At ZMA we do not require that our student's "know" these procedures but that they know how to use them. That would make us FAA. I doubt that other facilities are any different.