SO maybe your best bet of success is just to slow down the LI teams better than anyone else (and maybe that was your success). Not running LI though? That's just suicide.
Its specialized offense vs. specialized defense.
LI guards overpower their defenders ID in m2m because they are highly specialized.
The downside is they cant play much else. Manon talks about flexible combo-guard-SF-ish type players on 1-3 and 2 highly specialized bigs in a 3-2. A team like this, like my own, is very flexible on offense (critics might say equally bad on all ;)
However, bad offense is not a problem as long as your defense makes your opponent do worse.
Sure i run LI from time to time but not because its my best offense, just to be unpredictable.
I also disagree that this team will be much more expensive. LI guards are cheap (salary wise) but thats true for defensive bigs too. As long as their IS is low they are relatively cheap. My 75k C is surely not afraid of taking on a typical 200k LI C.