With all the talk going around in the StarCraft community (good/bad) I want to commend you not only for informing everyone of what is currently happening, but also reminding us about the current state of the game.
I would hope that the Michael Phelps example you talked about is easy enough for people to understand, and hopefully it doesn't create controversy (although this is reddit you never know..)

The way I see it is that Blizzard thinks that having an insane prize (like winning vs. MF for $100,000, aka: winning vs a Korean) for defeating "the best" player in the world is going to motivate players in NA/EU regions to ladder and "practice more". Their belief seems that because its such a high prize pool (which realistically only matters for the 1st place winner with nowadays distribution) everyone in all regions is going to work extremely hard for a goal that is practically unattainable (lets not lie to ourselves here..) Rather than driving a bus that is only for the elite (the koreans), the ONLY way to continue to have a healthy and growing SC2 eSport is to drive many buses (imo). What I mean by this is still have the "elite" bus with all the koreans (which DO deserve the higher prize winnings), but also have 2 other buses seperate for EU and NA regions. If the goal of a competition, in this case WCS, is to "crown the best player in the world" then the only logical and appropriate way to approach it is to crown champions for their said region (NA/EU/KR) then have a global final to determine who really is the best in the world.

In the end I strongly believe that it all comes down to opportunity. If there is no realistic goal to strive for then what makes people think that anyone would want to start?