Around one percent of new managers in USA d5 are going to make it to d2. Nothing "in your experience" could possibly change this. New managers should worry about trying to be in this one percent, not about what they will do when they get to d2.
The only reason to bring up my team's history is to show that training players isn't the long slog to success that you seem to have made it out to be. You can be successful rapidly while spending time training up players.
As to the second part, your team is an outlier with good draft picks early on and plenty of success. Probably in the top 1-3% of outcomes for a new D5 team. Even after this somewhat extreme case of good draftees and team success with 6 seasons of playing (the odds this OP even makes it to 6 seasons are really low)
True, I was lucky to get some very good draftees, but at least in the case of two of them, I probably paid more in scouting costs than I would have paid in transfer fees if I had bought similar players after the draft. But I think this highlights the fact that we may be arguing about slightly different things.
I feel like somewhere along the line "training your own draftees" and "training players in general" got conflated. I may like the idea of training one's own draftees, but regardless of whether you draft or buy trainees, I think training is an important part of team building. Don't extend that idea to a requirement that a team train
all of their players, or
only train their own draftees. I've gone back and reread what I wrote, and honestly I don't see where I suggested that all managers should do that (nor where I'd committed myself to only that approach- see below).
and you still only have two players you drafted who are in your league rotation. So even you have had to rely far more on the transfer list for your success than drafting, and you can't even claim the "almost all my starters be my own draftees" which is what I was objecting to.
True, only two regulars are my own draftees, but three regular starters are guys I've trained since they were created. And I only have 3 training slots, so it's a bit strange to impugn my approach by saying I don't have more. Again, nobody says you need to train all your players. Obviously, you'll need to fill non-training positions with veterans, hence you will have to use the TL. That's Training In BB 101.
This makes your objection to my stated
preference that "I like the idea of trying to have almost all my starters be my own draftees (or at least significantly trained by me)" very odd. If you read that sentence, it's not nearly the absolutist dictum that you make it out to be. Furthermore, I never said I had actually achieved this. So why bother to tally up if I have, and then upon seeing my failure to reach this fanciful level, suggest that my approach cannot work?
I have no problem with training one's own draftees to be starters. My problem is that making this your only strategy will take multiple real life years to have a good team, make it so that your builds lag your knowledge of the game by a year or more, and would require largely ignoring by far the best resource for team building in this game (the transfer list).
And as I said before, I never suggested it was my only strategy.
In the end though, this paragraph only makes sense if the sole criterion that a manager uses to evaluate their experience in BB is their team's winning percentage. For some people it may not be. To extend your MarioKart metaphor, yes, perhaps I am driving with my feet, but maybe winning a few races while feet-driving is more enjoyable to me than winning more races while hand-driving. And that's why I was careful to tell Mr.495 that he needed to consider his own preference before deciding on a course of action.