My $.02...

Having done a remarkably long trip through the wilderness of crap for BRK to make their first playoffs trip this season, I think I have some appreciation for both states of a team - utter crap and all-star laden. I agree it isn't a healthy dynamic, but stockpiling money and minor league talent is really the only way to jump into competition. It's already pretty hard to take a hopeless team to a real playoff contender, I'd be very careful with any changes that have the potential to do that.

We've tried a number of things during my time with the league on this. I'm thinking of the changes to the C auction adding contracts to the acquired players if salaries got too high (attempting to drain some money out of the league.) Also, the more recent rule penalizing teams that do not reach 40 wins. Ultimately I think we need to look at increasing the pressures/incentives on the superteams to return more talent to the pool. (Some folks may be familiar with the minimum usage threshhold from another Strat league with some overlap to ARBA.)

Some kind of overall $$ cap, or capping interest beyond a certain threshold sounds like it could be interesting. Whatever it is, I might also recommend phasing it in so as to allow any teams currently near or above the limit to adjust their plans.