Many things to ponder:

• As a multi-day event, Race Weekend (RW) is always hit with significantly higher costs per day than a single day event, primarily because of meals, lodging & overtime from the USACycling officials,
• Three years ago, all of the race directors in NY were informed that we were out of compliance with the NYS DOT.  Speed events (races) require a permit, which in turn requires an expensive insurance policy and dramatically more law enforcement officers than we used to use (6 vs. 1).  Since then, my fear has been that in the event of a bad accident or fatality, if it turned out that we were operating within the required permits, the OCC would be sued out of existence. 
• Road racing also isn't what it used to be.  Back in the day when Lance Armstrong was winning the Tour de France, everyone and their brother wanted to race their bikes.  Today when you look at USACycling and BikeReg numbers, there's been a slow decay for a long time.  Today the average American probably can't name a single professional bike racer, and now there are also innumerable cycling related events people can choose from; more triathlons than you can shake a stick at, and no lack of charity bike rides and 5k & 10k runs.
• Case in point: Battenkill:  Back in 2010, Tour of the Battenkill was a 2-day pro/am race and had over 2,200 registrations.  In 2018 it was down to a one-day fondo with 450 participants, and that's with a full time staff running year-round advertising,
• Registration numbers for RW have been flat for a number of years; adding the hill climb four years ago and holding the crit at the state fair last year didn't increase registration at all.
• Saying that the general OCC membership doesn't care about RW is the understatement of the century.  Anyone who has had the pleasure of trying to drum-up volunteers knows that it's a pretty soul crushing task.  Even before I was race director, the last few days before the race was a jigsaw puzzle of trying to figure out how to run the event with about half the volunteers that we actually needed.  When Gus was the volunteer coordinator, he started to beat the drum at the banquet in January, as we still ran significantly short of volunteers.
• After trying to find place on the calendar for RW with no other USACycling conflicts, early in 2018 the Tour de Cure changed their date to Sunday July 29th (same day as our road race).  A lot of race teams, including OCC members, have traditionally done this fund raiser, and I expect that it would peel off some of our participation.
• Financially, RW is a huge roll of the dice.  We front a very significant amount of cash setting up the event, and everyone waits until the 5-day weather forecast shows that it's going to be a nice weekend before registering.  A few years back we had registration open in January, and a grand total of three people registered in the first four months.

So what do people want?  Without a doubt, the CX race continues to be very popular and is relatively easy to set-up and run, and it continues to generate a profit.  We've also seen gravel grinders and winter fat bike races pop up all over the place.  None of those require any special permitting, large numbers of volunteers or law enforcement.  You can hand out peanut butter for prizes and people are thrilled.

Regarding 2018, if we want to hold an event with little financial risk and a high upside to make a profit, that the OCC membership will actually participate in, then boiling things down to just the fondo is the easy choice.  It's slightly more complicated than the fall century or the 70.2, requires no special permits or law enforcement, and only takes a handful of volunteers to run.  People get a bib and a finish time, so it can almost feel like a race, without the associated logistics of a race.