I appreciate the way you address the matters on their merits as you see them. That is what I hoped for a few pages back when I invited a GM to contribute constructively (the one who beat his chest and threatened me -- not exactly constructive).
You hooked me again. You're getting good at this.
And if you want the merits, here they go:
This is a basketball manager sim. Not a basketball sim. Note there's one word in one description and not the other. In one, you would have your roster, pick your lineup and tactics, and do whatever the game allows in game to affect the outcome. You wouldn't do things like player acquisition, arena building, economic modeling, etc. in a pure basketball sim. Nor would you do training, of course.
But that's not what this is. From day 1 (well, day negative whatever when the game was first being designed), there was no free agency, but training was mostly as it is today. So with all due respect to your opinion, you are not losing "your basketball sim" -- instead, OUR (22k+ users) basketball management sim is adjusting one component of one feature not even in the original design.
The thing is, I can respect a desire to play the game a certain way. On Hattrick, I decided I wanted a team that was all offensive and refused to carry even a mediocre goalkeeper, even as far as the top league in the USA. Here I decided that I wanted a team focused on defense and team balance, with an outside focus, with American and mostly home-trained players, and I pushed to see how far I could go with that (and had I been a better manager or avoided a two flagrant foul in one minute situation in a finals game, I would have done so in the top league). People play the game with homegrown players, others play with trainees, some play it as a market game while others use the market sparingly or not at all, and all choices are valid. However, that doesn't mean that they will or even all should have the same probability of success.
The simplest way of putting it is that if it is possible to succeed just as much without training as it is with training, for a given team, then training is by definition a worthless addition for that game. And this game was designed so that training is a key feature. If you don't like it, that's fine, if you want to suggest ways to improve it, you know where those go, but if you're hoping for a game where training is not a key part of the game's design, you're not likely to find that happening here. And on the other hand, a key concept in good game design is meaningful choices - if training were a simple "click here to gain one week's training", everyone would be doing it and there would be no strategy to it. So for training to continue to be a key design feature of the game (as it was intended) and for it to be something that requires there to be meaning behind it, there must be some factors that stop it from being an automatic decision, as an automatic decision is no decision at all. Which leads back to the 'illogical' training that you clearly dislike - no, it's not realistic, but it's the mechanism chosen by the BB staff when they designed the game to make sure that training has at least a minimal downside so that it doesn't simply become something everyone does and those with more money do better.
2) Managers utilizing many different approaches, each with an equal chance of success if they do it equally skillfully, would seem ideal to me, rather than favoring one to the exclusion of others.
It's simply not possible. If the market is very low, buyers have a huge advantage over trainers. If the market is very high, trainers have the advantage. Short of fixing prices, even putting aside the above stuff, it's not going to be possible to ensure equal probability for all player choices. What needs to be assured is that the skillful player can correctly assess the market conditions and make the choices to succeed in that market condition.