No, I think it perfectly reasonable and consistent that they are restricted by sector of space like practically everything else in the game.
I see no evidence that is the case. There is even this suspect flag proposal that came from somewhere, maybe the CSM, which would allow even the highest tier content to be run from highsec without making it the defacto place to run it and still respecting risk vs. reward. It would be nice to see the CSM summit section on this feature unredacted to get a sense of how the discussion went.
Again, it isn’t exclusive, or is at least it as exclusive as the rest of the content. Higher reward versions of the content are almost always restricted from highsec. You can do the lower tier/lower paying version of the content in highsec, but if you want to access the higher tiers, you need to leave.
There is nothing wrong or even different about doing this. In fact, we don’t even know how the rewards are structured, so it may be the case that everything, including the highest rewards, drop in all sites, and in is just that there is a higher chance of the best rewards dropping in the highest tier pockets. In that case, no reward is locked out from highsec.
I see nothing out of the ordinary about these sites as compared to all the other PvE that is balanced by sector. They will almost certainly be restricted or balanced in some way so that highsec isn’t the only rational place to run them, just like the rest of the content is. I think that is a given at this point, and from what was said at Fanfest only the form of that balance is what is being discussed.
I don’t think that is the result of nefarious machinations by the CSM looking to somehow claim these rewards for themselves. Risk vs. reward is just how the game works.