This part in bold would be particularly useful at increasing overall supply of players. Heck, to be honest, I'd love it if the cut off on Center salaries coming in off of bot teams was $15K instead of $35K. Even in DII you can use some nice backup bigs with salaries in the mid 20's.
As a recap for everyone (just in case there are some new folk reading along), players on a team that go bot only hit the transfer line if their salary is over: $20K for SF, $25K for Guards, $30K for PF, and $35K for C. Players that get fired from an active team hit the transfer line if their salaries are half that or greater. I'd like it if players from teams that go bot had the same filter as players fired from active teams.
However, I certainly think that there was method behind instigating these limits, and I'm pretty sure that there are factors and data being watched behind the scenes that we are unaware of that the Buzzerbeater Executive Team uses to determine when a shift needs to take place.
First, I'm not sure if there is an Executive Team in charge of that or if Marin decides unilaterally or if it's like the South Park episode where they cut a chicken's head off and see where he drops to decide what to do. ;)
Anyway, yes, the reason FAs were restricted initially was that the market was severely deflating, so much so that there was a perception that the value of training and players was too low to justify continuing to do that. Instead, the value of dollars on the TL was so high that it was commonly accepted that simply refusing to compete, carrying a salary-floor level salary, and accumulating a season of cash and then splurging on more wages was the smart play. And it probably was at that point, which unfortunately is a pretty sad situation for a game to find itself in. Kind of like WarGames, the only winning move was not to play.
Now, of course, a year ago we had a sudden influx of new teams and new dollars, and they were all hot and heavy for the kind of players that teams had been avoiding creating because there was no profit in it. So the prices on the players who were available (many of whom were the old players who would have initially trained before the deflation took off) went way up. The price of trainers shot way up too because there were suddenly over a thousand new teams who had level 1 trainers.
So where are we now? We can probably all agree that at some point before Utopia existed, prices were "too low" for a healthy game. There is a fairly strong consensus that prices now at some levels may be "too high". So the question is, on the assumption that the prices are too high, how does one fix that?
Of course, widening free agency is a temporary patch and may alleviate the pressure somewhat - though it probably would needed to have been done right when Utopia started to mitigate the initial surge in demand. But the problem with that as a solution is that it relies entirely on people leaving the game, which is as unappealing a situation to me as the WarGames dilemma from before. If the game can't be balanced without having to push people out to achieve the balance, it's probably too far gone to be saved in the first place.
If it were my game, I think a combination of massively increased training speed for low potential players, plus a guarantee they can reach a decent skill level (e.g., 10 in any main skill, 7 in any secondary) and improvements in the draft (add some older, "finished" 10-15k players who can't really be trained much further to replace the low end guys) would be a sustainable solution. It probably would end up going too far the other way, but if those players stop being worth much on the TL at least they'd be so quick to create that actually building your own improvement players would be more feasible.