Well, the point of sudden death is to avoid a match last too long.
But what is "too long" ?
I for sure think the actual wait value for sudden death is way too short.
I always played Tremulous on LAN, so maximum number of players might have been 4vs4, and in this configuration we never really had a game that never ended. We had some that were a bit too long and sudden death would have helped, but at least half of them would not have need it.
From what I've played every match of Unvanquished end with sudden death, for me that means that it's coming too soon.
I did not try setting up a server and I suppose that the time for sudden death is a setting, so if I ever play Unvanquished in LAN I'll disable it or put a big value. But for online servers I think it would be better if default value was longer (and I'm not sure but maybe it would make more sense if the time limit before sudden death depended on the number of player).