My cousin was visiting on Saturday, and I was judging on Sunday so I may have missed one -- but if I'm not mistaken, there were only three scale pilots at the Regionals this past weekend.
I'm gonna build an Ercoupe, because I've always wanted to, and because it'll be a backup event in case my shoulder never comes fully back on line. Maybe I'll have time to get it done for '18, if I can hold back on my ambitions to make it the bestest ever.
There are some really nice, easy to model airplanes out there. If you stick with something that doesn't have flaps or retracts or other gew-gaws you can, theoretically, get full points. If you want to support the event but don't want to build a model you can fly an ARF in Fun Scale (and there are some nice RC ARFs out there to convert). If you don't want to build something nice you can build some crappy scrappy profile and contend for 3rd place.
We need to keep scale going at the Regionals; without it we wouldn't have the fun of watching John Thompson run off his feet all weekend.