Most casuals or spectators do NOT appreciate grappling nor do they apprreciate 12 or more rounds of only throwing punches with big gloves on.
MMA to me has already displaced boxing. Casuals appreciate slams, all stand up striking and respect submissions.
But all casuals seem to love KOs and the idea of pure kickboxing. I am talking
Knees
Elbows
All kicks
All punches
Being legal
Muay Thai type org has the potential to be so exciting and bigger yet it isnt
thats easy, and I've been saying the same thing for many years (with varying levels of reactions) Just like the sport of wrestling America invented its own set of rules for kickboxing and that put their athletes at a disadvantage in international competition thus the United States never provided a competitive stand-up champion and not enough people are gonna buy T-shirts with some Foreigner on it!!!
The UFC did everything it could to push American wrestlers to the top because that's the only American that could compete in MMA so they continuously fiddled with the rules and kept certain athletes away as best they could. That's why they nerfed knees as best they could because Americans were terrible at throwing them and dealing with them. The lack of competitive Americans was a major problem in early MMA history for the Sports Development
I organized a community center kickboxing Club back when jean-claude's kickboxer first hit and overnight we were transformed into a Muay Thai Club because that's all anybody wanted to do and subsequently we became a MMA Club after UFC aired in 1993 for the same reason, nobody gave a damn about kickboxer anymore!!!
The sad fact is people are more influenced by movies than they are by Sport and sport is often times manipulated into Sports entertainment by by profiteers interested in selling more t-shirts and so if your local boy doesn't win you're not going to be selling as many t-shirts and most people don't give a rat's ass about the sanctity of the athletic contests unfortunately.
Judo wouldn't have been popular in France if they didn't invest in the sport and never produced any french Judo champions.
The irony is you have to win at a certain sport in order to make it popular and in order to get support it has to be popular so you have to win before you get the support but once you get the support you can produce more and more winners and it becomes a self-fulfilling snowball rolling downhill.
I had to kill myself to make mixed martial arts popular in my region but once we started producing winners I could stay at home and smoke a bong and our club would continue to grow because we finally got support
I didn't even have to advertise anymore
If the UFC added a "stand and bang" division that had an intelligent application of rules it would change the dynamic
I've always said old school Stadium Muay Thai was the ultimate spectator sport but they would have to bring back the slam and allow athletes to get a couple shots at a submission on the ground, even though this rule set has existed for many years in quiet unpopular martial arts it never got the exposure it deserved so it never became popular because without the exposure you couldn't produce localized champs.
Modern MMA is effectually stand and bang anyway anymore because all you have to do is stall in an inferior position for the standup
it's just ironic that no one has picked up on this strategy except Derrick Lewis LOL