Although the differences aren't as great now that a single conglomerate owns nearly all of them, NCA is generally the smoothest run and well-judged of all of the events. It has a history none of the others can touch. It was also the first company to truly embrace the "all star style". The arena during finals is unmatched in terms of production, "vibe", sight lines, and noise.
Worlds and Summit and the bid-chase culture they have brought to the sport have positives, but they also come with significant negatives for the sport. Immense added cost is one of those negatives. I have also never been particularly impressed with Disney from a value perspective. The added cost is huge and the competition venues are average at best.
For many years NCA was to all star cheer what UCA is to high school cheer.
Even at the collegiate level: NCA was to the all star style what UCA was to the crowd-leading style.
A lot of the younger people, and even older ones who are still relatively young in Cheer age, are completely unaware of the level of competition between UCA and NCA. They don’t know about the “brand wars” from when COA, JamFest, WCA (is this even still a thing?), ACA, WSF, Cheersport, etc were all upstarts trying get their foot in the door offering their own individual incentives to attend their events.
Many of them have missed the days when you might make major changes to your routine from competition to competition because tumbling was 7 million points at one competition, and you had to have a minimum of 14 8-counts of dance to max your score at another.
Rewinds were legal at NCA college nationals but not at UCA college nationals.
When Jeff bought out NCA, creating the FIRST cheer-opoly, the industry actually experienced a pretty good upswing. A lot of things that needed to happen, happened. There was some consistency in rules across college cheer. The initial formation of USASF brought more safety consistency. Even Worlds, in its infancy was a great concept that has been bastardized by the “everyone gets a bid” mentality. There are teams that earn bids today that would have never gotten a bid the first year or two even putting their current routines up against the routines of the past.
JamFest started to buy up some smaller comp companies creating competition and keeping it all honest. Then the SECOND cheer-opoly occurred. Virtually nothing good has come from that buyout. There’s no one keeping the Varsity machine honest.
By the way, my question mark by WCA was tongue-in-cheek. As I recall, they were the last holdout against USASF, and I’m pretty sure they went under. You may have a different history regarding that organization. They disappeared during a brief time when I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to who was offering competitions because I had taken a coaching break.