Back then the GDP of a small country wasn't the same as the GDP of a small country...
But the cost is still astronomical today. Back then, you could actually find six buddies, meet in a garage, and plaster some bits and bobs on an old F3000 chassis, and race that thing (see case: AGS). You wouldn't score points, but then again, who did?
F1 had more teams than the grid could support, but these teams where worth nothing. Some of them were just badly engineered, some of them too unreliable, some were so underfunded that they rolled out a new car without testing (something Aguri did, though - but they at least used last year's car as a basis). Unstable, unreliable, sometimes dangerously unsafe, and usually folded after a season or two.
With the 8 points-scoring position there are now, midfield teams actually score points and stay in the sport for a few more seasons, despite rising costs.
A system like this would discourage consistent drivers and encourage kamikazes. If your championship-order is decided by that 12th place you
might get, the backmarkers will become desperate, as will the midfield. Suddenly, it won't matter if you finished 7th a few times and scored some points, because another driver who crashes every other race suddenly didn't, and reached 6th position. He can then sit on his arse in 22nd position - he'll still finish ahead in the championship.
Who am I kidding, the changes would have been too great even without probing into the past.
As I said earlier - the last championship to have a result that would've changed was when Ayrton Senna lost it despite winning more. And he died in '94, so that's at least 14 years of the same order. In fact,
here is a chart of the last championship years analyzed with the new system. Not that much of a change, essentially. It would, however, punish drivers like Jenson Button, who scored far more points than drivers any non-Ferrari driver - but the lack of a win to his name meant he'd drop three places behind Montoya, Raikkonen and Trulli.
At the same time, however, 2004 would have won the
International Award for the Most Boring Sporting Event EVAR. Schumacher's early winning streak meant that the championship was essentially wrapped up before the halfway point, as his closest challenger, win-wise, had just one win to his credit.
