And you chose not to stay up there/could not advance any further. Probably because playing LI all the time is boring ;)
Where you were then and are now is different. I was in the top 100 WR for almost 2 seasons. I beat in b3 competition 3 former champs. I know there are ways to use other offenses and they have their place but LI is the undeniable base for everything, at every level. You get away with not basing yourself around it when the competition is weak, not LI based themself or training/tanking etc.
I bet your current team gets beat by non-LI teams all the time. You aren't in the top 250 right now are you?
I'm not quoting your whole post because this thread apparently blew up while I was away (I haven't read through it yet, either) and if I quote it all, there are no characters left for a response.
I chose not to stay up or advance because I hit the wall financially and agewise - the way I had built the club was that those star potential guys you railed on me as being not worth training who nonetheless played important minutes for me were approaching age 33 (the season I linked to, in fact, one hit 33 and dropped I think 3 levels of OD that season). The guards I had picked up over the seasons to start with them were pretty much the same age, so I was an outside team whose guards were all starting to drop skills. My bigs had several seasons left and were doing fine defensively against LI teams most of the time, but the guards dropping skills was a killer. But look back through the late S20s and look at the scores of my games - see how infrequently teams even got close to 100 on me, and keep in mind I was playing against NT level bigs in some league games and a lot in the PLs.
My current team isn't near the top 250 I don't think nor should it be. I have three 20 year olds now that I'm playing and training at SG that have played pretty much exclusively that position since I acquired them. So of course, you know what that means they are being trained in, and you know that also means that they haven't trained OD yet - though I got an early cross training pop on one of them, which was nifty. The fact that I'm even close to survival in III is evidence that the level of competition there has dropped dramatically. I didn't expect to even be back in III yet, and I actually ended up buying some players this season once I moved up since it looked like I might be able to stick around.
But the travels of my poorly-assembled and occasionally ineptly managed club that somehow fell into at top 1% WR isn't what's important. What matters is that there are roughly 20000 managers playing this game, and about 19500 of them will never approach B3 level competition. They are having it beat into their heads that the only way to play the game is by playing the same game everyone else is. That may well be true at a point - Manon as far as I know is the most successful to date and he reached as far as the round of 32, I think. But below that point, it's proven that with good management, a non-LI team can thrive, despite not having nearly as many players to choose from as an LI team would.