I don't believe that at all, and never have. Otherwise, F1 wouldn't have survived through the 70s, 80s and 90s when manufacturer teams were not the norm. IndyCar would have barely made it anywhere.
Anyway, I never argued you should take all the manufacturer GTE cars out and replace them with ORECAs. I said if you want variety, then just adding identical GTE-Pro cars is not the answer. I didn't say we needed more LMP2s - just that it can be argued that 4 ORECAs of different teams is actually more variety than 4 Ford GTs.
See, here's the thing nobody wants to talk about with the GTLM class - what happens when a manufacturer or two leaves? ACO pandered to them by basically allowing unlimited factory entries. So what happens when Ford leave, BMW leave, and maybe even Porsche drop a couple of factory cars? You go from lots of teams, to half the grid size. So when that happens you need to make sure you have a good healthy Am grid to come to fill in those gaps - and you need some to be healthy enough to possibly support the GTE-Pro class as well. If you don't have a healthy grid of Ams, that you support, that you give a good chance of getting a Le Mans entry, then those teams will go elsewhere - especially with how well SRO treats customer teams.
You have to cater for the small teams too because they're the only ones that will be there when the big teams go. I thought the ACO learnt that lesson when they did nothing to support private LMP1 entries whilst VAG and Toyota pressed on with mad budgets (VAG more so). Then they had to massively back peddle when they needed LMP1 teams suddenly. F1 is going through it at the moment, Le Mans went through it at the end of 1999, ALMS went through it. It's the circle of motorsport life. That time will come with GTLM, and it will be a much harder hit as long as you allow the factories to dictate how many cars they enter, and therefore how many small teams get the boot.
3 car cap on factories, please. WEC isn't in a particularly great state, and it will be less sustainable if the ladder is not nurtured. ACO is not exactly good at supporting smaller teams. Need to learn from SRO and IMSA on that one.
Of course the reverse argument is if you don't like GT cars, then just kill it off anyway.
