I have a few thoughts, so I'll just jot them down in no particular order...
Firstly, with regards to fishy's list of people that contribute, I'm not really sure how you came up with it? There's obviously been significantly less talk on the IV.7 forums, but I don't think anyone in particular is to blame for that. There hasn't been many discussions to get involved in this season, but there's every chance that guys have been busy with other things, etc. Also, you obviously don't have access to all of the other federation forums, so I don't know how you can really judge who is or isn't contributing?
I'm not sure that contracting is the best plan, especially if the plan is to cut something like 12 teams. Surely the more teams involved, the more likely there is going to be discussion, etc? Just because someone might be quite on the forums for a few weeks or so doesn't seem like a good enough reason to cue them entirely from the PL. How do we judge who should stay and who should go anyway? Who gets to make that decision?
I do agree that teams that pan on tanking/rebuilding, etc probably should sit the season out, s there doesn't seem much point in them playing if they're going to give up a massive win to their opponent each week. They should still have the option of being part of one of the federations though, if they would still like to be involved.
With regards to the redraft, it probably couldn't hurt to mix things up, if we want to keep the whole 'teams' idea going. The problem is, there seems to be one team that wants to stick together. Ill leave this to everyone else to come up with a solution.
I'd much rather see one federation where we could get together to discuss a bunch of things e.g buzzer related stuff, non-buzzer, etc. I'm involved in quite a few federations in HT and there's never been any problems with having to keep stuff 'secret'. I find the whole secret squirrel business a bit silly to be honest. If you want a more lively and active fishbowl then stop with all this secret business. There's a perception amongst a lot of managers that the fishbowl is a massive boys club anyway, so the fact that people want to keep things a secret probably doesn't help that perception.
With regards to the suggestion of implementing a handicap, I don't like it. The whole idea of a PL is for guys to be able to play the full squads with no injury risk, no game shape management issues, not having to worry about maximising training minutes, being able to try different tactics, etc. Telling someone they can't play their best player or two seems ridiculous. Sure, I might not be able to beat the majority of ABBL teams (except tremell haha) but that's just part of the game. I don't want to beat an ABBL team by making him sit out his best players and I don't think that's really in the spirit of competition. I can also see this being more trouble than it's worth and potentially starting dramas if guys don't adhere to it. Just leave it be I say and let guys play their best team.
After all that, I probably should talk about the most important part - the actual structure of the fishbowl. Perhaps it's time to give it a bit of a shake up and try something completely different? One suggestion could be a 'world cup' style tournament, with 8 groups of 4 playing in the group stage, then either 1 or 2 teams from each group progressing to the next stage and the rest of the teams playing off for the 'fishbowl plate' or something like that. Could also be a good time to trial other teams that want to be involved. There's potentially endless styles of leagues we could do, I won't go into them all know, but if people were interested I'm sure we could come up with an interesting concept that would mix it up a little. We could always go back to the original format after that and keep changing it up to keep things interesting.