When you drop the size of the userbase from 60k to 30k as fast as it did, and dump out the orphaned talent into the player pool, that will naturally boost the amount of players available and therefore reduce the prices.
Oh poor hrudey, it seems like sometimes then Free Agency has a bit more than a marginal effect. So hrudey has it both ways:
1) when it's convenient to hrudey Free Agency has 'very little' impact
2) when it's convenient to hrudey Free Agency does 'naturally boost' the amount of players and does have an effect
Ah the irony!
Yes, if we were dropping from 20k to 10k in the next season or two and dropped everyone into FA, yes, that would have a significant effect. Congratulations! You made me admit that something I have said isn't something I'd categorically say in every conceivable scenario. I apologize for daring to not consider the maintenance of an opinion that utterly disregards anything other than blind opinion.
the time spent not training has essentially removed an entire generation of players from the market at many levels.
You know that could be actually believable if you stated that the people who quit the game actually were training much more than those who are still here. A claim impossible to verify, but at least it would make some sense.
Are we refusing to admit that it's quite literally impossible to train enough players for everyone, something that even BB-Ryan has acknowledged? It should be obvious to anyone that this is the case, since it's impossible to build a fully trained homegrown team if you need 5 or more seasons (this is much less than 8+ potential players) to fully train a player and you can simultaneously train 3 players at most. The system is sustainable on 2 principles: people quitting leave trained players behind and, more importantly, a number of teams actually play the game with untrained or badly/partially trained players. In the current environment the untrained and badly/partially trained players will inevitably grow at every level.
Theoretically, if every team were training at pretty much full tilt, there would likely be enough excess players trained for sale to make some portions of the market be fulfilled, and possibly some even saturated. Theoretically, you can spend seven seasons training three guards, seven seasons training three bigs, and you've got a season to train FT before skill drops on the first batch of guards and the cycle starts again -- of course, if you can shave a couple of seasons off of the training time and maybe overlap some (finish guards and start bigs at the same time with 1v1, etc), you can come closer.
But that's all theoretical - and frankly I think you are well aware that I've said some sort of boost in training speed would be beneficial. In terms of the 'people who quit were training more' - I don't have that stat, but I think it's a very good supposition that before the deflationary time, a much higher percentage of people were training than were, say, the season before Utopia started up.