And you think that those teams have any more of a chance of winning in D2 than they did before? If you're not a real level 5 team, you're not going to win Worlds, regardless of how many divisions they add.
Those teams can get a bid now, and they'll get a bid if there are two divisions. It doesn't mean they'll make it out of prelims in either case.
This is the point.
I've listened to this discussion for a while now, and haven't really weighed in because I wasn't sure how to put my thoughts together. But basically, the issue at hand here isn't small gym vs. big gym - it's elite gym vs. everyone else.
The argument I made right from the get-go is that there are probably 50-75 gyms that can legitimately compete for major championships (i.e., Worlds, NCA, CheerSport, etc.). And then there's everyone else. As long as this stratification exists, you're going to constantly have issues where the elite gyms get stronger and the rest of the pack suffers because they simply cannot compete at that level.
And this isn't necessarily a business issue. There's a reason some colleges have FCS football teams instead of FBS, why their athletics will be Division 2 instead of Division 1. And it's not always that the Division 2 school is bad, or poorly run - it's that they simply don't have the resources and talent base to compete at the higher level.
Like it or not, that's the reality of cheer right now.
So guess what? Rather than just telling these programs to just "try harder" or "do a better job with their business", maybe it's time we realize that we need to have like competing against like.
Does that mean I like the Division 1/2 structure being proposed? Not really. In a perfect world, I'd still have Worlds but limit participation to "qualified gyms". Because Ashley hit on it - at some point, the talent pool thins out dramatically. A bad level 5 team isn't going to be do appreciably better in Division 2 the way this is structured. Perhaps that team shouldn't be competing level 5 at all, and somebody needs to save that gym from themselves.
Just like you can't have your local community college schedule a football game against the University of Texas, maybe we need to admit that Craptastic All-Stars can't compete against Senior Elite.* And that the real answer is to have a viable, year-end competition for everyone else rather than trying to jam everyone - regardless of ability level - into Worlds.
*Eh, who am I kidding? CAS forever.