It wasn't meant to be anything other than, Spending 4-6 years going through the lower classes to end up in Master where you'll stay for a very long time or drop out.

I've seen guys just burn through the lower classes and end up in Masters only to quit. Some quit because they've now run up against Master pilots that have been there for 10-20 years and can fly rings around them . Some make the grade, some don't. Those that do, like Glen and yourself, have spent the time, money and effort to do so.
I applaude those guys.

I guess my whole point is if Masters is to remain a destination class, (I don't really care if it remains so or not), then the journey should be a smooth and long ride, once you're in Masters there's no where to go but FAI or start over in Imac.

The result we've seen over the last 20 years, remember I was out of pattern for ten of those years coming back into it was a shock of major proportion, is the difficulty creep in the lower classes. This is directly attributable to FAI necessarily getting more difficult to keep those guys interested and weed out the also-rans from the guys who really can fly on the world stage. The rest rolled downhill right into "Masters" Heck Masters today is far harder than FAI was back then by a fair amount.

Killing off Expert was a mistake and disrupted the natural flow we had at the time. One can look at it two different ways I suppose.............

I just believe it was a mistake. If they'd deleted Masters and kept Expert we'd have the same result.

Tim