Recently, a blogpost was posted suggesting to stop or decrease division 4 contests, as a way to increase the amount of contests of higher divison. I fully disagree with this idea: Div 4s are amongst the most popular contests on codeforces, and more traffic means more people get exposed to competitive programming, which is great. Also, Div 4s are very easy to set, so they do not affect the frequency of other contests.
However, I do believe that the lack of higher division contests, mainly Div 1s, is a problem. This scarcity has a very clear explanation — problems E and F. Both problems are:
Very hard to create — I've heard stories about authors who spent months thinking of a good E/F, or simply make it a Div 2.
Not relevant to the vast majority of Div 1 coders.
Think about it — in a regular Div 1 contest, low masters, which might've just been promoted from Div 2, have to face far more skilled coders, such as LGMS, within the same problemset.
My suggestion is simple: Div 1.5s, where the problemset is of levels Div 1. A, B, C, C, D, D, instead of the regular Div 1. A, B, C, D, E, F. ABCD is challenging enough for $$$<= 2600$$$, so adding two more problems would be even harder. We can see from the frequency of Div 2s that CD are not hard to come up with.
In conclusion, this could be a complete gamechanger, and can cause a massive rise in contests for higher rated participants.
