I will request that you two stop clowning around and get back on topic, which to refresh your memory is:What do you think it would take to actually make it possible for there to be a lot of different ways to compete to win basketball games on this site?
You can't really be so terrified of an honest discussion that you are compelled to hijack the thread, are you? Why not delete your off-topic posts and let this thread get to some constructive discussion. Thank you.
An honest discussion? That would be interesting. The way this generally goes is you have a spurt of swipes that the BB economy / transfer prices are this way because the BB staff is intentionally doing that, as part of a plan to make it so that the only way to do anything in this game is to train. I point out links to BB-Marin's actual words on the topic, which as you are well aware, were that they were trying to make sure training is valued as well because the old paradigm was that players were cheaply and freely available. I also remind you that these trained players must come from somewhere, and a game environment where people don't want to train themselves but want to harvest the players from the TL, and at low prices, isn't sustainable unless there are a lot of old teams quitting and dumping their players into the pool. I point out that training could be changed, just not the way you seem to advocate, and then your "honest discussion" consists of not bothering to elaborate or discuss further and repeating the whole cycle from scratch in different thread(s) a week or two later.
But on the specific notion that there aren't a lot of different ways to win - my honest answer is that there still are. Teams can be built in many different ways and be successful. Teams can be built primarily through training and succeed, can be built through transfer acquisitions and succeed. You can be successful with a cookie cutter inside team, or with a heavy shotblocking focused team (see LA-Manon's run), or with an outside shooting team. They're not all equally *easy* and none of them are independent of a manager's skill in the game, so a talented manager can likely thrive with many different team concepts, while less competent ones will find that no matter what they do, they're not capable of moving past a certain ceiling. Such is life.
For what it's worth, it's absolutely been possible to not prioritize training and move up - I had to look to find the team again because I forgot what league they had ended up in, but Valhalla!
(28218) in the USA was a team that went from V to II through three straight promotions, with training not at a significant component of his team. He then walked away from the game in his second season in II. If you're on the USA offsite forum the team diary is still there, and it was definitely an interesting way of approaching the game. I also imagine that if he showed up here today and started in V, he'd be in II again within four seasons, because the guy just had the knack for what he was doing.