[Basel A]

Remember that regionals and districts do all of their own fund raising, and most registration fees go to FIRST, largely for KoP and other costs.

The district model is about cutting the cost of putting on an event, so you can have more events. With more events than Michigan teams can fill going to two events, one might as well allow teams to go to three. Indeed, there's incentive: more competition. Should make it cheap because (a) they can and (b) teams would already have added travel costs.

If regionals were cheaper to put on, then there would likely be more regionals. If there were more regionals, FIRST would have reason to decrease registration fees, because many teams would then be going to more than one regional, meaning inflow of money to FIRST HQ doesn't change (much).

tl;dr If there's more regionals, the cost of registration should go down. Do this by making regionals cheaper to run, like districts.