"If by ignorance, you mean "poor judgement", I agree with you, and I
think this is the theory behind the finish cylinders, isn't it?"

No... the cylinder is a placebo. Ignorance (and its primary effect -
poor judgement) are dangerous anywhere. The finish cylinder presents
the very same problems as the old high speed start gate. Next time you
see Rick Indrebo, ask him about separation of traffic.

I'll give you an example of a lack of situational awareness. You
responded to the following:

Will the pilot above and
behind me pushing to redline notice I'm in front flying at best L/D
in
an attempt to avoid missing the bottom of the cyliner?

"He's safe - he'll separate from you when he pulls up, and you aren't
going to pull up. That's a good situation. It seems unlikely he won't
see you ahead of him as he approaches. I've seen the same situation
finish gates, anyway"

Eric, he'll never pull up because he just flew through me several
hundred yards short of the gate. Been there. Seen it happen. Seen many
more come damn close. All your responses to my questions make
assumptions that aren't necessarily shared by all pilots. IE, the
cyclinder suffers the same problems that the finish gate does: it is
foiled by ignorance and resulting poor judgement.

The strongest arguement is that of density. A one mile radius circle
makes for alot more space than a 1 km line. Unless everyone is coming
home from the same turnpoint, in which case they are flying to the same
point, same altitude, and at a variety of speeds, with too much
attention on computers and altimeters. Implosion. And no regulation.
Performance information is on the panel, not outside.

The closest I've come to a midair in the past decade was at Hobbs two
years ago, in a 10-mile radius turn cylinder. I was distracted by
several gliders converging from about 45 degrees of arc to the very
extreme end of the turn area. I nearly hit someone below me as I
started my turn at the edge of the cylinder. I'm guessing at least half
the 15M nationals turned at that same point within about two minutes of
each other. So much for density management. At least we were all doing
about the same speed: 90 knots. So things happened pretty slowly. Let's
throw in some 60 and 140 knot traffic at the other end of the task,
just to keep things interesting.

As I said before, ignorance is much more obvious at low and fast. But
it's not any less dangerous high and slow. I think the number of pilots
who don't read the rules before competing is an indication of where the
problems lie. If a pilot is unwilling to take two hours to read the
rules, then he probably hasn't given much thought to the environment
he'll be flying in. This equals IGNORANCE.