My attitude towards appeals is that any contestant has an unqualified right to appeal any ruling by the director, for any valid* reason. Whether the appeal will "change the outcome" (of what - the board? - the event?) is not relevant, and should not be used to "justify" refusal to hear the appeal.
* "Any such appeal, if deemed to lack merit, may be the subject of a sanction imposed by regulation."
"sanction |ˈsaNG(k)SHən|
noun
1 a threatened penalty for disobeying a law or rule:
a range of sanctions aimed at deterring insider abuse."
The threatened penalty, in the ACBL, is apparently an "appeal without merit warning" (AWMW), at least for a first offense. If there are other sanctions for later "appeals without merit", I'm not aware of them. Nor am I aware of a regulation imposing either the AWMW or any further sanction.
I've never understood the attitude that "I'm not going to appeal, it won't get me first place" or whatever. I can understand "I'm not going to appeal, it's a waste of time" or "I have to go pick up my kid/husband/prescriptions" or whatever, but I don't necessarily agree with it. If the player has a legitimate need to be somewhere else, fine, but often it's just an excuse. I think that if a player disagrees with a ruling, and it's not just because he's annoyed that he didn't get a favorable one, he ought to appeal it. Particularly if he thinks there's been director error, or bad judgement on the director's part. How else are directors going to learn to make better rulings?
I particularly don't like the idea that my partner can quash an appeal because "appealing makes me uncomfortable".