That’s not how that works at all.
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It’s probably more to do with business than anything else.
The players you’re likely looking at are probably sponsored with signature yoyos. There’s less money in hybrid yoyos becuase they can cost as much as a bimetal to make but people won’t pay the higher prices for them. That means they’re in smaller quantities and less often made (availability is also a factor here). So a player will use a monometal or a bimetal because their sponsor thinks that’s a great way to recoup the money they invested to send those players to these events.
Obviously there’s more to it than that. Preference will play a big part. People just like metal yoyos more, even if there’s more potential performance in hybrid designs. You can get a higher MOI from a hybrid than a bimetal, if all specs are the same, but most players don’t actually care about maximum MOI. If they did, everyone would only play with the Converge or Balloon lol. The yoyo has to feel right for everything they’re doing. It has to be reliable and predictable in how it moves and responds. Or it just has to be a pretty colour. Everyone has their own reasons for competing with a yoyo, but the top players will be doing it because their name is on it and that either pays them money, gets them free travel or both and metal yoyos are just better at making money than plastic ones.
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I agree with you until the very very last point. More beginner yoyos would also be metal if metal was a better seller. Otherwise the Butterfly wouldn’t have started out plastic
It’s not about it being a better seller, it’s about it having better margins. If a company wants to make a hybrid yoyo and make the same amount of money per yoyo they’d cost the same and most people would turn their noses up at that. Imagine if the Iceberg was $120? Do you think they’d have sold nearly as many? Of course not.
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Ok that makes more sense. I thought you were talking about popularity overall.
It mostly sucks that we don’t see more hybrid yoyos because they cost so much to make. We’d have a lot more cool yoyos if people were ok with $100-120 hybrids. I love them and I want to make some myself but can’t justify it unless I could charge more for them. I’ll pivot to different materials in bimetals instead 
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Dude a brass hybrid would be amazing. That weight distribution would be extreme
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Not a fan of brass. Too soft. More titanium ring hybrids would be cool though
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This makes the most sense to me.
The best players can do it with anything, and signature yoyos are really the only way they can make money from yo-yoing.
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So, I looked up the actual friction coefficients because before it was speculation so I wanted to put numbers on it, and I couldn’t find the numbers for blasted aluminum, but according to the numbers base aluminum would in fact create more drag on the string, so sorry guys, you were right. 
definitely not what I was expecting. It’s a significantly higher drag then what I was expecting too. I guess it would probably also have something to do with the amount of vibe and initial spin time of the yoyo as well, but I’m no physicist, I just graduated highschool (although disclaimer I did study this briefly), but I’m actually super curious if there’s someone here who does have a degree or further studies in this this who could enlighten me a bit because even though it makes slightly more sense now, I still got lost with treated vs untreated aluminum and I’m super curious about that now.
Edit: my data did in fact come from the plastic/plastic and the aluminum/plastic coefficients in case anyone was wondering, but I’m not sure if there’s any significant drag caused by like, an electrostatic attraction that adds anything to that force in either of those numbers. I would imagine that there’s not, because I mean, there’d have to be some crazy properties with those to generate enough electric current to offset that, but I figured I’d throw that out there just in case.
Another edit: in fact I thought about it for 2 more seconds and that’s virtually impossible unless your dealing with VERY large amounts of those materials spinning at a very high velocity, and even then I don’t know enough about these numbers to say that for certain, but again, I have no idea if that was taken into account when those engineers posted those numbers for the friction coefficients
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You may be digging down an unneeded rabbit hole…
The goal when we are yoyoing is for the String not to touch the yoyo. Designs like the Koncave Bearing were intentional to keep the strings off the walls during stacking in the gap. Speaking of Walls, yoyo design for competition has almost a Zero Wall between the Response and Angle towards the rims.
Basically a negligible input to the Design and Construction of a Yoyo (Drag Coefficient).
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Fun rabbit hole to read though. Excessive amounts of research make for fun reading cus it shows involvement lol
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I like overthinking things. I know the actual value of the information is really low for a performance perspective, it’s just fun to understand better.
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P44 recently had a pre prod run of there new yoyo that has plastic in the response area specifically to reduce drag vs the aluminum body.
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Oh yeah yyf damage had that 
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If you want to look into a case study; Luftverks Design of the Injection Molded “Pucks” for his current line is a great one.
Mr. Jeff designed a system for the Blanks in a way that he can produce different yoyos from. We have seen the Plastic Fluvia, Hybrid Fluvia, Plastic 000, and just recently the Plastic Peak. One thing to note about Mr. Jeff’s endeavor is the sheer volume of these items to produce.
This volume is required to recoup the 10K it costs to have the mold produced.
Again a example of how “easy” it is for these Hybrid styles.
With Metal, Small Runs, design tweaks are a lot easier.
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I feel that if yoyos had more of a U-shape to them that drag would be reduced even more. Like literally just leave room for the response pads around the bearing but have like next to no walls at all around the bearing
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Thanks 
The Mazal Tops Mentsch was developed at least in part as an affordable yo-yo with performance comparable to the bi-metal Rectifier. I think this makes sense for a small brand - there are probably more people who will take a chance at $65 than $120.
For a larger brand that is sponsoring top level competition, I’m not sure that it makes sense to push “affordable” options in that setting. Hybrids would need a competitive advantage other than price.
And even then, brands would probably have a hard time selling as many hybrids at the same margins as their bi-metals. Plastics seem to be widely perceived as less valuable/premium. Durability issues with previous generations can’t be helping.
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I was super excited about the hybrid fluvia until the batch issues came up and while they seemed to have been resolved it the damage was done I was skeptical and kept from buying it. Personally I like hybrids my monarch and iceberg are often in rotation and my overthrow as well although many where not fans have of that one.
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