I saw this petition advertised at LP. While I'm in favor of restoring figures, and changing moves, it's just impossible to do old style figures at modern rinks.
a. no ice time available, yeah unless rinks want to go bay to the past when they had sessions in the wee hours of the morning (like 4 am)
b. even if you try to practice on freestyle no one will yield to you
So old style figures is out.
The only way to make figures successful is to modify them to make them new style. Blend them in with moves, earlier on, or have the first test as a pre-req for moves.
Bring new audiences into figures to expand the demand for ice time: adults for fitness/balance/core training, and hockey players for edge control.
but no one in USFSA thinks way out of the box.
As far as the new audience thing, that's a pretty neat idea, hockey players and adults. My idea for figures was basically make it another sport. Basically, compulsory figures I would see as good, because, it wouldn't take the sheer athleticism that freestyle does, and it'd pretty much level the playing field for adults and people who start late, whereas with freestyle now, it's hard to really get good unless you've been practicing since you were in the womb. And even for the people that have the practice in, the other issue of just sheer athleticism comes into play with the triple and quad jumps. And as far as freestyle skating's direction, the general public would much rather see it move in the direction of "gymnastics on ice" and make it into more purely an athletic sport.
So I think compulsory figures pretty much would have to be it's own sport, and pretty much be a "precision" sport like golf or archery or something like that, just on ice. I think it could happen that way, similar to how ice dancing evolved into its own discipline, but I think because of the "gymnastics on ice" thing, the ship has totally sailed as far as including compulsories into freestyle skating. So, if compulsories survive at all (it does seem most people were quite happy to be rid of them) it will survive as it's own sport or discipline. I think what will happen is people will start doing independent compulsory figure classes and whatnot, basically out of novelty (as far as I understand it, the ISI actually still does compulsory figures competitions) and if it catches on, the USFSA will sanction it somehow.
As far as ice time goes, yeah, it's not gonna get much ice time. But even curling gets ice time. At the rink I went to in Vermont, they'd have a few curling sessions every week. So I don't see how compulsory figures couldn't get the same type of success. One possible advantage in the general public's eyes for trying compulsories is boots could be cheap, no need for crazy stiff boots. You'd be legitimately OK in a set of beginner boots and you'd be able to stay in them a long time. But, as I said, it'd have to start at the grass roots level, and then USFSA would eventually recognize it as another discipline.
The only possible problem is the temporary image crisis it'd create, since figure skating for such a long time has tried to distance itself/move away from compulsory figures, and sorta erase it from history, so it would be an image issue to work on, and in the most extreme case, freestyle figure skating might just be called "freestyle skating" or like in many other countries "artistic skating" instead of "figure skating." So that'd potentially be an issue depending on how popular compulsory figures got again.
But that's how I see this happening. Online petitions generally never do anything ever. BUT, if a grassroots effort to revive compulsory figures in the way I described happened, then USFSA would have to accommodate it somehow.
Just my thoughts, I'm 21 and compulsory figures weren't even around when I was born, so I have no personal memories of them or anything like that, though when I saw them on youtube I thought it was very neat.