A partnership formed on the tour - the tour proved you can mix things up like that - Kelly Brook has danced with three different pros - one in the show, another at Crimbo when he dancing with his current partner and yet another one on the tour - because original show pro never does the tour and crimbo pro was dancing with his current celeb and then gf. All partnerships worked fine.

I preferred the Christmas specials when they had past contestants and current contestants from the series it followed. The last 2 or 3 years with the newer format I've found the dancing to be mediocre and I've not got as carried away by the whole thing.
I think the number of dancers I'd like to see again could fill several christmas specials...Tom Chambers, Gethin Jones, Austin Healey, Chelsee Healey, Kara Tointon amongst others.
Though some of them haven't danced in a while, I suspect they would still have more technique and performance skills than what comes out of a couple of days of training from the new celebs.

Last year felt like such a waste of my time to have watched, it was lacking something, some sparkle/spark... and the wrong person won! (in my opinion )

I was thinking about this and what I'd love - never going to happen, I know - is a contest for the pros at Christmas. I'd love at Christmas to watch really fantastic dance after dance from pro couples I've come to care about, I'd be interested to see what dances they'd chose and they are natural competitors so you'd get a great competition. I can see the problem would be the judges giving scores and someone winning and maybe that might create more bad feeling than would be worth it. But I wish there was a way of doing something like that.