Wejo,
I'm the one who posted "Round one to Nike, it would appear."
I make that comment based on my own perceptions, not anything I've heard from Nike, though our team was involved in an NTN regional championship meet.
Chris Derrick and Colby Lowe run NTNs with what has to have been a pretty clear understanding that they were jeopardizing their FL chances. Ben Johnson opts out of FL entirely to run NTN. Numerous girls attempt to run both with more than a few who had a shot at making FL nationals (though maybe none with a credible shot at winning it) running only NTNs. Did Madeline Morgan have a shot? Maybe, but a long shot if she did. She certainly could have been top 10 at FL.
While I think it's clear that Nike did what they could (whatever their motivation--and I don't know what their motivation was, so this isn't sarcasm) to avoid conflicting the NTN regionals with FL regionals, the first year of NTN regionals did appear to thin out the FL regional fields to a significant degree. Moreover, I think Nike has been light years ahead of FL in responding to what the competitors want from the event. Nike actually gave away some gear at the regional meets whereas Foot Locker continued to chisel away for every little item. It's not the nicest thing that anyone's ever done for me, but I appreciate the NTN regional hat they gave us there. It's little things like that that start adding up to good will and returning runners down the road.
It's true that FL had more of the most elite of the high school elite individuals at its national meet than NTN did, but it's not true that a combined race would populated up front solely by individual runners. The aforementioned individuals make that evident. Yes, the top 20 would definitely be tilted toward individual runners, but how is that a terrible thing? Six out of seven people on every team are used to not being the frontrunner, anyway. For the seventh one, a little stiffer competition just might be a good thing.
So, I still say "Round one to Nike."