What you forget is that the game was growing back then.
When the number of users grow, inflation is due to the extra cash circulating in the economy. So even your "crap" players would have increase in value like everyone else because in season 8 there would be 2 managers willing to buy those players from you. Is that the case today for horrible players?
Now think what is happening with a userbase which is shrinking. There is actually less managers, less turnover (old managers replaced by new ones) and less cash compared to back then. So what it's actually happening now is that pricing are high and rising not because there is more cash in the economy, but because there are fewer players and fewer managers.
Your reasoning is the same as Marin's, but it's plain silly to confuse high demand and low supply and behave like they are the same phenomenon.
But it seems that some people think they should be able to pay no more than 200k for a good player, and some people even think that they are somehow entitled to get a good player for 400k. Well, that is not a realistic expectation. But you can get a solid youngster for that money... and train... and learn... and advance... and sell... and repeat...
And now even this route will take twice as long than it would have 6 seasons ago, thanks to taxes and to the fact that you need several seasons in order to turn in the required profit, therefore you're not helping training and emerging managers. In fact you're actively encouraging brutal tanking more than training itself, although they are usually done in combination as several GMs can tell you first hand. It is also very unlikely to encourage training low potential players.
eventually you will be able to afford yourself those truly great players. And that's the way it should be, at least in my opinion.
By the time you have that kind of cash through training you will have built those players yourself, too bad you can only build 2 or 3 at a time and they will all look exactly very similar when they are finished.
And I don't think that this route is really so much affected by new FA criteria.
You kind of missed that point where we discovered that young high potential players (and certainly great training candidates) are retiring because of the new rules, while they would have gone back to the market in the previous system...