How is it possible for Europa B02 team to beat 2 DA teams and loosing by a goal in the final in playoffs to Arsenal you mentioned? Why this team was in Europa in the first place? There is not much but politics that's left in SCDSL.
All those DA teams on a year off were in Champions bracket anyway and played each other. What about all the other age groups? There is no DA teams there.
Its possible because:
(1) there are many very good players and teams in SoCal that have no DA aspirations, so just because a team is made of mostly DA players doesn't mean a non-DA team made of very good players can't beat that team. The talent pool in SoCal is very deep and there are literally thousands of kids in SoCal that could displace other kids on DA teams. DA teams are not invincible and many Coast Premiere and SCDSL Flight 1 and CSL and ECNL and other teams have the players to compete against many DA teams. That Strikers team was just plain good. They went undefeated in their Europa F1 season and would have beat most of the Champions F1 teams. Give the boys and coach credit for being a great team.
(2) DA teams on "off years" tend to be made up of the weaker/bench players because the studs are good enough to play up in the composite age group. I believe that Arsenal team that beat Strikers lost 4-6 of their better players who went up to the 2001's or other non-DA teams closer to home.
(3) Now, as far as that Strikers team being impacted by politics, I don't think that is the case. That Strikers team was middle of the pack the previous year (5-4-1) with many players playing up. If you look at the players on the 2017 roster, in 2016 many played on RJ Castle's 2002 team; in 2017 they played on Castle's 2002 team. This tells me that these kids were good enough to be very competitive in 2016 playing up, and when playing at their appropriate age level they formed a top flight team.
With regard to the other question (the other age groups), CalSouth has about 170k registered youth and adult players (this excludes ECNL (Club), DA, NPL, etc.). Let's assume 150k youth players. If we take the top 10% of those players that means there are 15k youth players in SoCal representing the top 10%. Let's eliminate 2/3rds as too young (under 12). Leaving us with 5,000 players. Assuming 18 players per team in 6 different age groups, we are looking at about 46 teams in each age group to be split betweeen CSL and SCDSL. There simply isn't enough DA and ECNL teams to take on those players, so we will always have a need in SoCal for brackets/leagues that give some of the top talent opportunities to play and compete. The reality is that many of these teams will not be made up of the top 10%, rather the top 20% and its nearly impossible to aggregate all that talent on those 46 teams, so we will have many more teams with varying degrees of talent. Putting the top 8 to 10 in each of the leagues makes sense and CSL already does that.
Bottom line, I believe that we have so much talent in SoCal that we need to look for better ways to give that talent opportunities to play at a higher level. DA is regionally exclusionary, with many potential DA players refusing to make the 4 day training commitment and traveling in SoCal traffic 4 days a week (5 hour per day commitment) [when my son was asked to train with a DA team, we left at 4pm and didn't get back until 9pm ... nope].