By all accounts you are a very experienced racer. By your comments you have an extremely limited grasp of composites.

Marstrom produces both bolted and glued beam set ups. The bolting is popular due to being able to more easily ship the boats. Glued beams do not necessarlily provide additional platform stiffness over a properly done bolting system but it saves, on an A, about 1 kg of weight per hull as you do not have to add spot reinforcing for the bolt point loads.

Right now an Ashby A is almost 30K in the US. These are not even carbon but Kevlar. There is an all carbon Falcon that was purchased by a guy for a lot less than that, and the F16 has quite abit more complexity, loads and kit than an A class. The point being the ultimate costs of a boat do not vary all that much with the materials.

To answer you other question, yes it is more but not that is not the only factor. If there were no box limits, then creating an faster better craft with exotics is possible. Making one appreciably better than one made with what is standard materials available today is not. If someone is going to come to the water in a "million dollar" class killer design, it is going to be because they spent that money on rig development, not carbon.

I fail to see any logic behind banning any material based on arguments I have read here.

And just because there are a few class members who feel strongly about defending the class rules as they are a good part of the reason they got into the class in the first place. Light weight and the ability to have some development are aprt of what is attractive to the guys who set up the rules and a lot of the guys attracted to the class.

The F18 rules were supposedly written to encompas as many 18 foot production existing designs as possible at the time and keep them. This is F16 and and because they do things different than the F18 does not mean that they have their head in the sand.