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I am going to put out a contrary hypothesis.
Most people here analyze the decline of horse racing in exclusively betting terms. So it's takeout, or it's whales, or it's something else that affects pools. And I get that. Betting is important.
But try a different approach. When my father was a kid (pre-WW2), the three biggest sports in America were baseball, boxing and horse racing. Baseball isn't quite as big as it was then, but it is still a huge sport.
But the other two have declined.
Meanwhile, pro football was nothing back then, and is now the biggest sport. College football was big but second tier back then, and is now on the first tier. Basketball was nothing back then and is now either the second or third biggest sport. Hockey is a lot bigger now than it was then. There are other sports, such as NASCAR, MMA, and beach volleyball, which have risen up since then.
So what happened? You can't explain all these different things by looking at betting.
What happened is the public's tastes changed.
And if you really want to bring people back to horse racing, THAT, and not any issue of takeout, is your marketing challenge. If you can do THAT, then you can worry about charging them a bit less to bet or getting some of the whales out of the pool or whatever. But if you can't do that, none of the reforms of the betting system are going to matter because horse racing will be a closed system with an ever smaller and older player pool.
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