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In my Private League games I've been experimenting with Let Coach Decide.

In this game I submitted a blank lineup card (no starters/backups/reserves assigned) with Let Coach Decide: (17527977). Minutes were spread out pretty evenly and everything made sense.

By contrast, in this game I set a starting lineup but no backups/reserves with Let Coach Decide: (17527980). The starters played all game except for some chess-match substitutions at the end to shoot desperation 3s or rebound FTs. That's not very much decision-making by the coach My bench is fairly talented (relative to my starters) and Havens in particular is not a usual starter, I find it hard to believe there was no need to sub all game.

If the starting lineup I set in game #2 was disregarded and didn't take the court at all I would chalk it up to coach's decision and that would make sense. If substitutions occurred sort of "as appropriately", that would be coach's decision and make sense. Having the starting lineup I set go out and play all 48 minutes is what "Strictly Follow Depth Chart" is for, so I feel like the behavior I witnessed needs to either be documented or fixed.

Yes, I'm sure I had Let Coach Decide set on both games. I double-checked it in the "re-use previous tactics" drop-down.

The coach will always pick between starters/backups/reserves except on special occurances like chess-mate subs as you named it.
In game #2, he had no choice but to play the starters.
In game #1, because you didn't dress any player in the line-up, he went on to choose from the selected players.

I believe it worked as intended. I hope it helps :)

Neither tactical option completely excludes the other, which is to say that your selection on coaching tactics determines the relative weight of the lineup chart and the AI selection. Therefore, since the weight difference between "starter" and "not entered into the lineup" is pretty significant, it was enough for the said behavior.

On the other hand, when you leave everyone off the lineup chart, they have equal weight, so the AI will rotate them entirely on his own weights.

It's certainly less than 100% intuitive, I imagine, but this behavior seems to be necessary so that the AI can sub correctly in games.

Well, then I suppose perhaps I disagree with the implementation more than consider it "wrong". If it's "Let Coach Decide" then I don't think I should be influencing his decision so strongly. At the very least, this should be explained in the game manual -- the other options seem to act in a more straightforward manner.

My concern is that in game #1 the AI seemed to do as good or better of a job than I usually do in setting my lineup. I interpret this as it being privy to more information than me (sublevels of skills, the actual effects of stamina, the particular usefulness of certain skills at certain positions, possibly even the opponent's skills...). The results in that game were quite good -- I achieved very high team ratings (for what those are worth) and beat a solid team. The results in game #2 were pathetic for obvious reasons and I will make sure never to do that again until/unless the system is changed to something more useful.

I think it would be a good thing if you could set a starting lineup and have intelligent substitutions. In the all-blank-lineup game #1, I think 4 or 5 different players logged minutes at SF for me. I can't do that with any of the substitution patterns besides Let Coach Decide, but I also might want to prioritize certain players for gameshape/training/matchup purposes by setting them as starters. That seems reasonable to me. It's the same as this "weighting" system you propose but less radical/imbalanced.

I guess this is somewhere between a bug and a suggestion depending on perspective.