What a bunch of old sooks you are all turning into:amazon:
For sure the big fence is a nuiscance but I would think it would be more to stop entry fee dodgers than the safety aspect after all it was only a two foot plastic fence that separated us from the air show. And yes way too many people are happy to jump a fence to avoid paying a few dollars without realising it only takes away viability from things they enjoy.
As far as fly ins for the sake of a flyin, I am really on the fence with this and I think we all need to look at that realistically. If you want a national (not just a local one but a national event!) ultralight flyin that doesn't incorporate any family friendly activities you will eventually fail For a couple of reasons. Firstly after a year or two people will get sick of flying great distances just to kick the tyres and numbers will dwindle away (maybe we have seen this before but have selective memories?) unless you start to add little things to maintain interest like maybe a landing comp or maybe a neat circuit comp or maybe an air show oh wait, what? Secondly a dedicated no family activity flyin is even more reliant on weather, just looking at this years airventure as an example how many people just on this forum didn't go because of weather? If it had been a flyin flyin then I wouldn't have bundled my family up in the car and gone along with basically all the non flying in people there and with the weather as it was I wouldn't have flown over myself and when you add all the people up who would be in the same boat you really cut into numbers of attendees.
Also, if it is just a flyin with no other events you have even less of a gaurantee of numbers attending so you won't get trade stalls reliably.
Anyway there are probably more things to consider but that is enough to start with. We can't sook about aviation dying and sook about no youngsters taking up flying at the same time as sooking about family friendly activities like airshows!
For sure the fences may be overkill and they certainly aren't at every event but I suspect it had more to do with money than safety and I think that is understandable if we want to make things feasible without bigger charges that would hinder numbers.
I enjoyed my time over there today, my whole family enjoyed their day. Plenty of other folks I talked to enjoyed their time.