Right, but statistically, what is the probability of a median income household holding a LOT of financial assets which are not a home. (For most folks, the home equity is it, and UC/fafsa ignores home equity.) Now I grant you, that there are hundreds of thousands of small business owners living with several sets of ‘books’ and thousands of immigrants living off of offshore (family) wealth and who pay cash for homes in really nice 'hoods, but we ought not be designing statewide policies to cover these outliers.
btw: my S, non diverse, non hardship, non anything else, also received a Regents offer and they even threw in a research stipend of xx dollars for study abroad or whatever (but that was a few years ago). But yes, the UC makes it quite public what the two flagships are seeking.