For years and years and years, in fact since Class B originated young athletes worked thier tails off to get to the Regionals (that is what we always called them) for some teams it wasn't in the cards year in and year out no matter what the situation, but now and then the smalls or the the cindarella would sneak in and then even sneak to State.....in the early 70's only one team left the district tourn and made it to the Regional, then it evolved into 2 teams from each dist. made up the Region tourn etc etc...
bottom line? it has always been a combination of "players and program" (and some advantages as stated below) when it comes to who left each district and made it to the Region tourn....but each district then had many more teams and the District tournament for most fans was much more fun than the region tournament was as far as atmosphere....and I suspect in the 5 regions that are still hosting District tournaments that maybe, maybe not, things have dwindled a bit when it comes to atmosphere and attendance, rightfully so....but the Region format lets say for Region 2 and Region 1 as we speak makes the most since in the aspect of more regular season games played and having all teams in Region play one another at least one time (I personally think a they could eliminate some of the 1 point games and find someone else to play) even though more travel is involved.
also, to have all the play in games at one site makes no sense to me....because who gets the night game and who gets the day game etc etc and along with that the district tourns of the past weren't always where the Region Tourn was ......in fact more importantly make sure there is no home team advantage at any of the Region tournaments....
think of this scenario and see if things have bettered.....In the old District 10 days the town of Cavalier (Class A then) is where Districts were played, well, when Cavalier switched from Class A to Class B in 1980 the District tourn was on their home floor....now with that and the fact that they had 70 to 80 kids in each Class do you think they had a slight advantage come District Tournament? same goes for Langdon......do you think folks would be griping nowadays? haha.....
things get thought out much better these days IMO and the format in place now for the eastern side of the State Region 1 and 2 IMO is the right format...