1) make the rules so that the challengers have a decent chance of winning the whole thing.
2) make it cheap enough that rich people want to play for the sake of playing (like most of us do on weekends on a much smaller scale)
The issue is that no singularly wealthy person would allow #1 to happen unless they wanted to otherwise be done as the Defender. The issue with #2 is that doing that would affect the singularly wealthy's person ability to keep #1 from happening.
The whole AC concept is flawed in this regard. The way the DoG was written, it was never intended to be a fleet of boats racing for the cup. It was written so the race would be one rich guy against another rich guy in a pretty cut-throat manner. Clearly, even that is incredibly flawed shown by how long the USA initially retained the cup (which is amazing that challengers continued to show up). The fleet concept and commercial concept are a bit of a round peg in a square hole in this regard - another way to inflate some egos by putting on a show.
That said, I do believe that catamarans are quickly finding wider acceptance in the larger yachting community and the AC is helping with some of that. I can attest that I've seen some shifting landscape the impressions of traditional sailors toward our cats and it's seemed to pick up pace since the last AC. It's been happening gradually over the last decade but we're not quite the "novelty show" to them that we used to be and we're being seen more often for the high performance machines that we sail instead of the yacht club riff-raff that just wants to reach back and forth. The modern F-boats are also helping with that perception.
I do hope the AC figures out how to balance the egos, commercial viability, and competitive nature of the event but I don't think they ever will in this format under these rules. So, hopefully, they can just find a way to keep it entertaining.
