Again, the racing secretary would know best how the races would fill, if something in the conditions could be tweaked, or if a few races could be eliminated. I'm just tossing things out there.
Specific to NY, there is a lucrative NY breeding program. The purses are inflated and there are breeder incentives. When you subsidize something, you are likely you get more of it and less of something else. That's what happened in NY over time. There are a lot of state bred races now and the quality keeps improving.
At one point the gap between NY Breds and open was fairly significant. These days there's not much of a gap between the state bred stakes and the corresponding overnight and listed stakes they run. Some of the better state bred horses would fit nicely in open non graded stakes.
Maybe there's a subtle way of pushing some of the better state bred stakes horses into open company via the conditions and then subtly pushing some of the non graded stakes horses into the graded stakes. That won't solve the issue of stand out favorites in some of the big graded stakes, but it could add a few horses that would make the races more interesting to exacta, trifecta, and superfecta bettors.
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