At a gender-balanced encuentro or marathon, it can sometimes even be worse.
I do not attend such events, so take this with as much salt as you need . . .
I have friends who attend such events here. They share videos – sometimes openly, sometimes despite "no video" policies (so, sure, some of my friends are rules-breakers, which may be relevant to my perception). In those videos, I consistently notice two things:
1. A lot of dancers (by no means all, but more than I would expect at an "exclusive" event) who are – by any meaningful standards you care to apply – less capable than my partner and me. I see lackluster musicality, skewed posture, limited stability, small vocabulary, and even shoddy floorcraft (despite the USP of a lot of these events being "good floorcraft"). Yet they are invited. My partner and I are not.
2. A style of dance that irons out large categories of movements (the
categories are large, not always the
movements) and looks cookie-cutter. My partner refers to it as "living dead" or "zombie" dancing, as it appears to lack energy and creativity, often amounting to marking 1-1-1-1-... interminably with short steps and rocks.
So, after a period of whining about never being invited, I've stopped whining. I've come to realize that the appeal is mostly the exclusivity and, perhaps, being able to claim mastery by limiting the dance to a style that hides peaks of skill by removing elements that require it and that rewards conformity. In short, I'd say "sometimes worse" is accurate.
Which said, I can imagine that "dance among peers who are totally in agreement with me on style and expression, without the distraction of diversity" could be seen as "better" by some, for reasons similar to why some people prefer to live in gated communities where all their neighbors are similarly wealthy and, often, of the same skin color.
