I have to say one more reason why these programs hurt league racing so much is that the best drivers I have seen there are often able to reach quite close to optimum laptimes of their setup after only about 50 laps of practice and that's why racing is more like setup making competition sometimes and that's what makes it interesting.
I don't understand what does that have to do with ego if people want to have own private setups. It's part of racing, even i don't want to be able to get my opponents setups but now when there is a chance, of course I use it because they do the same towards me, and this has happened already. It would be cool if setup making remains as part of racing so I really hope you will find a better solution to this problem.
Well you are right in that but only if we are talking about hotlap setups. But those tenths you can find by using faster setup (in hotlapping) are also important sometimes, specially in demo. I believe the current bl1+fbm WR would be quite hard to beat with bawbag's ex WR setup for example. On s2 tracks the margins are typically bigger because the setups aren't that close to perfect yet of course.
Yeah of course that happens but there are also often many good strategies that may work as well but why would anyone try to do major changes to their (stolen) setup and strategy if they already have one that is proven to work well. Some years ago I found often different strategies and it was also easy to notice that top teams had significantly different setups in every race, nowadays everybody are doing the same thing and it's just a bit boring.
Evidence: Try to drive oval with minimum wings and then try again with maximum wings, are you still able to drive same laptimes?
So yeah, setups can be important and there are many reasons why it hurts league racing that much. Some of them were mentioned above already but also it becomes more interesting when there are more drivers/teams with different setups and different strategies but nowadays it's often so that everyone just steals the best available setup and maybe does some small changes to make the setup fit theirself and everybody got the same strategies.
Session of Incident (Official Sessions for Round 5: Qualifying 1, Qualifying 2, Race): Race
Lap AND MPR timecode of incident (or session time or UTC Time of Day): GT2 Start, Lap 1
Car(s) involved: 54, 77
Location of Incident (Track Map Here): SC1 last turn
Brief Description of Incident: 54 pushes 77 out of the track. This made 77 loose many positions and a lot of time and almost caused a huge crash.
I believe there would be still quite okay competition and participation if the GTR races would be just single events instead of series, at least the team races. And I don't know are multiclass events possible anymore in future :/