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Marketability and aesthetics matter here too. When I discuss MMA with other fans, I don't think I've ever met someone whose favorite weight-class is heavyweight. If we take the general claim that people want to watch the best athletes in the world at a given sport, this is actually a pretty interesting result! Elite heavyweights would surely handle lighter fighters without any real trouble and we've even smaller jumps like Izzy Adesanya moving up and struggling against Jan Blachowicz because of their visible power differential. And yet, the guys I like watching the most are welterweights (170 pound weight class), and I think that's a pretty common opinion due to the depth of the weight class, excellent speed and conditioning, while retaining enough power for knockouts to be a constant threat.
I think sports that are banning trans women and placing other restrictions on sex anomalies are certainly focusing on safety and fairness, as you mention, but it does seem like there might be a bit of marketability and aesthetics involved in decision-making for sports where revenue is involved. Is it possible that people just think it looks stupid to have mannish-looking XY women dominating track races? This could be a combination of fairness, marketability, and aesthetics.
This is a really interesting point too, since it seems obvious that people aren't just aiming to watch the very tippy-top best competitors in the world, they also want to see, well call it 'entertaining' matchups, which I'd guess roughly translates to "the best displays of pure skill."
And Heavyweights, I'd argue, are NOT where the highest skill levels are on display. Still fun as hell to watch, but more for the pure spectacle of two gorilla-esque men tearing into each other. But something like Demetrius Johnson's Suplex into Flying Armbar probably only happens in the lower weight classes.
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I know nothing about MMA. If all weight classes were abolished, would it essentially just be the heaviest fighters at the top? Is weight such a dominant factor that there's no point where some combination of diminishing returns, weight/agility tradeoff, and the larger population in the lower weight classes would yield a smaller top ranked fighter?
This will vary somewhat based on the actual sport itself.
But any sport that allows grappling is going to be dominated by heavier fighters, if only because the ability to heave your opponent to the ground and lay on top of them is... well fundamentally it is impossible to counter this strategy if you're smaller and weaker.
There's a reason all of the top wrestlers of all time look more like Grizzly bears than humans.
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Maybe that point exists, but it doesn't exist below cutoff for moving into the heavyweight division, which is at 205 pounds. Above that, the tradeoffs apparently do start happening with speed and coordination, because heavyweight is the only UFC weight class that isn't strictly dominated by people fighting right at the weight limit for their class. Heavyweights must be 265 pounds or less, but there are occasional champions and many competitive fighters that weigh in around the 230s.
In lower divisions where the gaps are only 10-15 pounds, fighters due move between weight classes with some success, thanks in part to how weight cutting works - a guy that fights at 145 often weighs 155 before their final cut and may walk around at 165 before starting their training camp and leaning up a bit. With proper notice, fighting at 155 instead of 145 becomes feasible for quite a few guys. Connor McGregor won titles at 145 and 155, then tried to move up to 170 and failed pretty badly, losing the power advantage he had at lighter weights while also losing speed as he gained weight.
So, yeah, to a first approximation there would be no such thing as 155-pound fighters if weight classes didn't exist. Guys that currently fight at 205 or in rare cases 185 may be able to bulk up enough to compete in an open division, but it would be more or less strictly required to be 220 pounds or heavier to be competitive.
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Barring extreme outliers, yes. There's a reason why fighters dehydrate themselves into a life-threatening state to fit into the lower weight bracket. Every pound of muscle you can put on helps.
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