Honestly, I wanna give my opinion on this. I'm not really active in the SEA scene in terms of finding out about the players here since like how I find out about players in the rest of the world. I could probably only remember less than 5 top players from SEA, the rest are just names that I don't really know about/never seen any games from.
And keeping that in mind, SEACL is suppose to be that league where I can tune in and find out more about the gosu's in SEA. If you just bring in people from other regions who have no affiliations with SEA, then the people who are getting the exposure won't be SEA. As much as I would love to see some random non-SEA player whom I've never seen around here before also participate, it would only defeat the purpose of the SEACL, which in my opinion is to provide exposure to the players in SEA.
But since this is a tournament, we should also provide some leniency, like to Soulman, who does in fact participate in the sc2sea community. While there may not be clear rules about it, I expect people to have enough common sense to understand the situation and act accordingly.
Even the smallest donations help keep sc2sea running! All donations go towards helping our site run including our monthly server hosting fees and sc2sea sponsored community tournaments we host. Find out more here.