The second question i have answered a few times, but i believe i did provide good analysis as far as what the other coaches would do once i got involved midway through the campaign. The whole 'what is the other team likely to try to do' is pretty easy when you analyze their position. It's an argument of "Hey, this US team has guards and bigs with 20 IS, what am i gonna do?". They're going to do what they did against italy. In all seriousness though, some teams are playing for the finals, and some teams are run by u21 managers seeking to put themselves in a position to say "look i've done something useful". Those are the easier calls for me to be right on, because i can say "They're going to go all in with a guess of inside and a CT", and it's hard not to be right. There were two games where we probably could've made a different call, but we won the first one and lost the second one, and thats the end of that pretty much (and to be fair, we had HCA and it didn't particularly matter).
Promoting "specific builds" isn't really a way to get ahead of the curve. In some cases it's different approaches to games (the difference between a proper LP and an LI for example), in others it's about solving a depth issue by taking a slightly SF and running out a third guard to aid in ball movement and clock control. Getting ahead of the curve requires revisiting how to obtain a higher percentage buy-in amongst managers. The more people contributing more players and information, the better the team is.