Hobie Cat Company-For profit business
Hobie Class Association- Volunteer owners group
NOT the same thing...

At no time(both when the company ran the class or when it switched to the private group) did either allow open boats.

Open boats in the Northeast USA started when some Hobie owners did not want to cut their mast and install a comptip.
This was happening in Rochester and Buffalo, the two largest regattas in Div 16 at the time.
Then as long as they were running a seperate start for non class legal boats they invited other cats to increase their numbers.
Well, it didn't work out, both events started to lose boats in time and not grow as anticipated.
In Syracuse we had some old salts who pleaded to not allow the open boats as it would fragment the class and we would see a loss of numbers instead of a gain.
There were a number of reasons why this may have been the case. One of the ones that I saw was there were to many starts at a regatta. If you were in 16C fleet you might have to wait an hour for your start and then have a 30min. race. This turned off a lot of people who stopped showing up. I truly can't think of anyone over the last 15 years that switched to a differant brand boat and continued to race in this area. So the idea that sailors are seeing better boats when the events opened up(non sactioned) doesn't have a lot of merit.
Having to many differant boats and fleet levels (Hobie company & HCA issue) along with adding two more open starts at the regatta's caused it to be no fun for the newbies.
The consolidation of boats may turn out to be a good thing.
Remember, there were open boats for 15 years. It didn't raise the numbers.
We(Fleet 204)stuck with the Hobie only format. We were the largets Cat race in the country last year and are consistantly in the top 5 year after year. It's hard to argue with results.

By the way I am for the F18's sailing at the HCA events and breaking out manufactures at the F18 Nationals to crown brand champions along with the overall.
I think the Hobie 16 and the F18's along with the A cat will have continued success and the others will come and go.