Hmmmm? Sounds like maybe the old Junior, Senior, Open classes based on the calendar rather than a couple hundred different judges' opinions over the country's surface wasn't such a bad idea after all.
After all, there is much less basis for argument over the outcome of a contest where the only measure of the pilots' skills were the result of the same judges' opinions as to his/her performance on the day of the meet based otherwise only on the recognition of their dates of birth.
For the Nationals, I agree with you, naturally, and I think it was a very big mistake to change from "Open Sportsman" as Dave Cook had it, to the official "Advanced" class at the NATs. It was even bigger mistake to have Expert, which had the apparent net effect of removing about 20 participants on average - as the people who flew Expert were from Advanced, and when Expert went away, those people did not come back. Getting rid of Open and replacing it with Expert (as I incorrectly expected to happen, when one of the two inevitably had to go) lets in the parasites trying to sell RTF and custom-built models to turn it into FAI Junior.
But I can see multiple problems trying to JSO at local contests. One example - if you do JSO at Golden State, say, you wind up with 41 entrants in Open, 0 in Senior, and 1 in Junior. Try to do it all on Sunday, and that is *82* flights the judges have to look at. So you might want to do is split the field, run a single round of 41 on Saturday, a single round of 41 on Sunday, and both flights have to count. That starts having the same issue as a WC, with rounds lasting 6-7-8 hours, and if you get the "hard" circle on a day with bad weather, you are dead, you are in great danger of wild ballooning, so the draw matters, etc. You have to have 4 completely dedicated judges, no contestants judging other classes, since there aren't any.
The NATs addresses all these issues acceptably well, by requiring large numbers of dedicated judges, 4 circles, and 4 days of actual competition. Note that the size of the Open field at the NATs is usually about 40 entrants, too.
That's just the logistics issue - putting everyone in Open also makes the effect I am trying to cure worse, or much worse. Now, our former Beginner entrants are pitted against David/Paul/Chris every other weekend, and the chance of meaningful competition is distant at best. If everyone is OK with that, then why do we have skill classes at all? I still think it is a good idea to have intermediate levels of achievement and reward making a different at a local level. I am trying to figure out a way to restore that to a working system, which I think it was in the 70's-80's. It appears to be largely non-functional now - very soon we are going to have a few guys who could only marginally get through a pattern in March (whom I again decline to name) be pitted against double-digit NATs and large regional contest winners with decades of experience due to being pressured to enter Expert.
I think there are about three big factors that have caused this- first, Midwest Beginner Pattern replaced PAMPA Beginner. With all due respect to the late (and unquestionably great) Bill Zimmer and crew, the effect was to create a class for one or two people a contest, and compressing it from 4 to 3. It probably solved the original purpose, but now Intermediate looks an awful lot like the former Beginner, Advanced looks like the old Intermediate, and it pushed a lot of people who would formerly been good Advanced fliers into Expert which is the issue at hand.
Second - widespread availability of unlimited and easy-to-use engine/propulsion packages. Everybody's engine almost always runs pretty well, and always puts out far more than sufficient power. This reduced the amount of experience and "craft" required to get an acceptable run - literally anyone with $400 or so is set. This is radically different from most of the history of stunt (and why I get so frustrated when people keep trying to do it the old way, and going out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot). You can fly in wind you can barely stand up in - also reducing the skill required to develop before getting "pretty good" at stunt.
Third - same thing with expert assistance - always available at any level at any time of day, and direct access to National and World champions who will tell you exactly what they do, why they do it, and how to do it in any amount of detail possible.
This makes it vastly, vastly easier to get to the level of "pretty good" stunt flier, i.e. consistently recognizable shapes, acceptable sizes, and acceptable quality flights in even rough conditions. Those alone shove the new flier into at least Advanced, because Beginner is generally a one-time experience, and Intermediate is usually won by the guy who doesn't run out of gas and remembers all the tricks. Do that 2-3 times in a row, and you are peer-pressured to Advanced, get a few months of practice and good help, and you are winning Advanced, too, and then you get pressured into Expert - with as little as a single season of experience. I was pretty sharp, had good help and it took me around 10 years to do that, now we have people blowing through in a season or two. And then they are going up against the "stunt as a life choice" types forever.
I still think that using skill classes at the local level should be examined for utility, and I can't see going to JSO just from the standpoint of logistics, not to mention the effect I am discussing getting much worse.
I have another alternative (run everyone in one class, in heats, and let the scores sort it out), but that has some logistical issues, too.
Brett