Good question. It’s not about the equipment and it’s not even about match racing. It’s about how sailors (mostly younger ones) identify with the sport. Can you remember playing street hockey in the driveway when you where a kid? One kid was pretending he was Bobby Orr another Gretzky. It’s no different with sailing. That 16 year old kid in cut off jeans doing bow on a Tartan Ten is dreaming that he is on an IACC class yacht. With the AC in catamarans that image starts to shift and catamarans start to loose its “crazy old guy on the beach who doesn’t really know how to sail” status. It’s about what younger sailors aspire to. Whether they ever actually make it to the AC makes no difference. Losing the Olympics was bad for all these reasons but the AC has much more gravitational pull in the sailing community at large.
I think your most important question is “how do you leverage it.” I’m not sure about that one yet.