As someone who played and got moved up to IM last season I can confirm that playing in open is not really an experience as people claim it is. Pretty much anyone with a couple braincells and decent aim can be moved up to Intermediate with a somewhat coordinated team.
There is no prestige in playing in esea, and paying simply to be competing in a league that charges more because of it's "established business status & industry leading cheat client" doesn't really make sense to me. play cevo.
I remember a year ago looking at players who are now in invite (who were in intermediate at the time) thinking wo, I wish I could be as good as them. Now the status of IM and open have gone done so much that even players who are pretty bad can be playing in IM. Sure not on a good team, but they'll still be in the division. Most of the matches I've watched this season have been rolls one way or another carried by 1 or two players, so i'm not sure about this better competition.
At the end of the day, most of your playing experience will come from scrims, where you will be scrimming teams of around your caliber. (If you actually care about getting better and you scrim) So I've never really understood why you would pay more to play in matches with relatively the same outcomes. There are good teams in CEVO, just like there were good teams carried by a couple players in ESEA OPEN this season (budsquad, quantum flux). The finals of esea open were matches carried by a couple of invite players playing their mains in open. So better competition? I'm not sure.
wrote this on a phone so it's bound to be filled with typos and grammatical errors