I expect there would be interest in a "king of faction tournament" based on a history of such tournaments. If there is no interest in a tournament and the ladder league is a bad way to award people as "kings" of a faction, then maybe we just don't give that award to anyone.
I wouldn't mind crunching the numbers to calculate the winners of 27 "prince" or "baron" of map awards. I would just need something like a printout (in text format, or csv, or excel) of every ladder match with the IDs of the players (I'd rather use ID than name because people can change their name during or after a ladder season), the map name, and whether the system scored it as a win/loss/draw for player 1. I could easily sort it out in excel to calculate the appropriate winners and then report back the IDs of the winners. I could definitely do this once every 60 days.
Creating 15 or 27 avatars and adding them to people, that I have no idea how to do or how much time that would take. But figuring out who the winners are would be easy for me. Also, we could recognize people's success without actually giving anyone an avatar, if that aspect of the whole thing is too much work. I would crunch these numbers for FAF even if it was just to report it to the forum.