Removing Gold is due to a two-pronged problem:

• The player base in NAHL is decreasing to near Season 7's numbers. Obviously divisions are going to start to give when Season 7 didn't even have Gold and it's Platinum division was almost 3 times larger than the recent ones.

• The mentality of the people who play competitive NAHL is often not one of trying to actually be competitive, but rather people trying to win the easiest division for them. This happens in every division but the caveat is that in Steel/Silver it is mostly "okay" because those divisions are large and comprise the majority of the player base by a significant amount. It becomes a problem in Gold because Gold was designed to be the "IM" of NAHL where players would actively try to improve and struggle to become Platinum ready, but most teams that place high in it disband and reform with slightly different teams lists to simply avoid playing in Platinum which harms the entire high end ecosystem. It's no secret that competitive TF2 has been bleeding high end talent for awhile now and teams doing that kind of thing is actively sabotaging the only way to create new high end talent.

If the latter wasn't actually an issue I would say that Iron would have been the better cut considering their current player base, but the latter is absolutely an issue that they can only really fix by making Platinum big again to make people feel more at ease with playing in there. The only real way to achieve that is to remove Gold unless you muddy up what Gold is supposed to be entirely. It puts NAHL back to how it was in S7 pretty much, which is fine for the amount of players it actually has.

It's a shame because I still believe that the whole idea of Gold at its ideal best is the right thing to have since it creates an Open (Silver) - IM (Gold) - Invite (Platinum) kind of structure, but for a variety of reasons (lack of paying to play there, the round robin system in Platinum, how the medals are setup so people try to chase 1st-3rd place Gold, etc) the mentality just isn't there to support that system I think.