I actually prefer the dance age brackets because the difference between the top ages for each division is 3 years. In cheer, everything is 3 years, except for the 4 year gap between the top age for juniors and seniors.
Things I've thought of that I don't think I'd mind seeing, but I don't think will ever happen:
-Change the top ages for cheer to match the top ages for dance (6 for tiny, 9 for mini, 12 for youth, 15 for junior, 18 for senior), while raising the bottom age for seniors (and maybe add a bottom age to juniors as well). I'm wondering if adding that extra year of eligibility to each division would soften the blow of a higher bottom age for seniors.
-Like I mentioned in the post above... I'd really like to see a bottom age on Juniors. Bless any coach trying to coach a team with both a 6 year old and a 14 year old on it. Some days the difference in how I have to coach a 7 year old vs a 10 year old makes me want to pull my hair out. I've worked with younger teams for several years and I absolutely believe that the little ones push themselves and work very hard, but there's a huge difference in a 6 year old busting her butt vs a 14 year old busting her butt. They generally learn at very different paces. You can't always explain things to both of those age groups in the same way. "Nice" coaches and "strict" coaches still have to be very different in those styles depending on age. You either need to slow down and work at the pace of the younger kids, or work at the pace of the older kids and hope that stuff will work out with the younger ones... and more often than not, I see the kids who look significantly younger than the rest of their team tucked in the back because they can't keep up. It's doing a disservice to the kids to put them on the same team.
-If a division 1 and 2 split actually occurs someday (and is based only on gym size), maybe remove the bottom age limit from D2 gyms (smaller programs) and leave it on D1. It seems that the argument against raising the bottom age for seniors is always that it's going to hurt smaller programs- and I'm sure it does. If you only have 20 kids in your gym, you're probably only going to be able to make one team, and having to turn a few kids away because they're too old or too young has to sting at a gym that size. Larger programs should be able to build age appropriate teams because they have a larger pool to build from.