Kirk, I'll plead guilty to looking at this from a personal perspective. I agree that SCCA needs to think strategically, but part of thinking strategically is providing racing programs that are attractive to members - which is the agglomeration of a bunch of personal perspectives. If you don't "stroke the egos" of the Majors racers who like the program, and tell them just run "races", maybe they will. Or maybe they'll just leave. Market forces might generate an informal replacement of high demand races, but I have my doubts. If the Majors racers like the program, why take it away from them? Again, who actually benefits by doing so? I see it as a negative for the Majors racers, and don't see what good it would do the current regional racers. What is that "sound theory with the potential to be more healthy in the long run"?

I don't see why we need to push everyone into the big pond. Almost all amateur sporting organizations have multiple levels of competition. The NCAA doesn't tell North Dakota State or Wisconsin-Whitewater to play the Alabamas of the world. They have their own championships for the lower level teams to fight for. Why should SCCA be any different?
Not everyone has the skill, commitment and ,yes, money to compete at the National/Majors level. Your "It's called competition. Get some." comment is far more condescending to regional racers than anything I've seen from the PTB in SCCA.

And if you think that lots of racers will be running for a long time with SCCA if they are put in a position where they have essentially no chance of being competitive, I think you are wrong. The closest example I can think of is what occurred in drag racing several decades ago. As I remember it, stock class drag racing was seriously ill because many classes had one or two racers who had developed their killer cars that no one else could match without the expenditure of a lot of time, effort and money. Many racers just gave up trying. That was the genesis of bracket racing. A few road racing organizations have tried it, but I doubt that's really the way we want to go.

I agree that you can't limit what racers are willing to spend, but I think it's silly to say that the club shouldn't factor racer's spending into designing their programs. As I've said many times before on this subject, you can't limit what racers can spend, but you can certainly limit how much benefit they get from that spending. The two most popular classes in SCCA are SM and SRF, and they are also probably the classes where the speed differential from fastest to slowest car in class is the least. The two are related. Anything that can be done to lessen the benefit of spending money will make racing more appealing. And so is reducing the amount of money you need to spend to run and run competitively. The biggest obstacle that SCCA has to expanding the pool of racers is that: a) it costs so much to run at all, and b) it costs a whole lot more to run competitively. Providing a "small pond" helps address b).

I'm with you that class consolidation would be beneficial, although I also agree that inertia and history will make it difficult. But I really don't see why there couldn't be a goodly number of classes combined that have the same type or cars (or even the same cars, i.e., Miatas) and run similar lap times. For example, FC, FE and FM all run similar lap times and with some judicious weight adjustments could easily run competitively with each other. Same for EP, STU and maybe GT3, or for STL, GTL and FP. I know everyone wants to run their current car unchanged, but if the only change that is required is to add 50-100 pounds to the faster class, I don't think that should be an insurmountable obstacle. As long as the class rules are otherwise unchanged, what's the problem? However, if the PTB want to start changing the class rules to make them the same for the combined classes, I don't see that ever flying.