"Nothing but expense, travel, and a chance at the Runoffs were the only advantages to nationals aka majors."
Stephen, there's a solution to your problem -- don't run majors.
You in the NEDiv have a goodly selection of regional races to run, just like us here in the SE. We (and you) have more races than we can reasonably hope to attend already. I'm truly perplexed at what would be gained by making everything just "races". If your local track has a Majors, that might be one more race you can run cheap (no travel). But there's nothing stopping you from running them now. Even if you are in IT or some other regional-only class, there is almost always an ST or Prod class you can run in. I've done it before. I was hopelessly uncompetitive using an IT car in STU, but I got to race. But unless you have a really strong regional-level car, you're always going to be uncompetitive at a National/Majors anyway.
My impression is that a lot of the serious Majors racers like the new program. It concentrates the really serious racers at a few events with a very high level of competition (or at least the highest level that you can get if you run in a lightly subscribed class or in a weaker division). I think the people shooting for the Runoffs generally liked the change from running a dozen or so Nationals with usually weaker fields to running four weekends with bigger fields. If we make everything "races" and they all count for towards the Runoffs, I don't see that being well received by the Majors racers. Remember, in SEDiv, you're talking 71 regional races, plus this year 12 Majors races. At that point, qualifying for the Runoffs is essentially meaningless, unless SCCA just decides to forget about "qualifying" and just lets everyone who has run, say, four races go.
I think the serious Majors racers like things as they are. And before anyone takes offense that lots of regional racers are pretty serious, too, I agree. However, there is a difference between serious majors racers and serious regional racers. And it mostly relates to money. Regardless of how serious a regional racer you are, it's very unlikely that you're spending the amount of money that it takes to run an comparably competitive Majors effort. That is the main virtue I see to the Majors/Regional distinction. It allows the serious racers who aren't willing (or in many cases even able) to spend the money it takes to be competitive in the big pond of Majors. A lot of us realize we're always going to be small fish in that big pond. But we can still be big fish in the small pond of regionals. And you're proposing that we all get pushed into the big pond.
I still get the impression that the underlying reason that people keep proposing making everything "races", is that they want IT to be just like the National classes. Kirk's discussion above is effectively arguing for that - the top X number of classes would likely include most IT classes. But as tGA has said many times, it ain't gonna happen. And I seem to remember that the idea that the less attended classes didn't get to go to the Runoffs was proposed just a few years ago - and withdrawn due to the firestorm from the membership.
I agree with Butch that somebody needs to explain again what benefit we would get from eliminating the Majors/regional distinction. We've had one for a long time. This doesn't mean it's good, but it does't mean it's automatically bad, either. If we're going to make such a change, I'd like to see a good reason to do so. I haven't seen a good one yet, and I've mentioned some reasons why I think it wouldn't be such a good idea. Again, why do we want t do this?
