"I've been using this site since March 2003 whereas you've been using it since 2008 apparently (although, of course, you may be on a newer account). Should we revisit the concept of who has more "experience on this site"? Sure, I've been more baseball-focused the last few years (and I've never been the type of user to have more than one team of any sport at most times), but that doesn't mean I don't pay attention to the basketball sim and screw around with making teams every now and then. Which brings me to my ultimate point:"
I don't give a flying **** if you have been on this website since the first dot com appeared on the internet. You have 4 full-season BASKETBALL teams on this user handle, the one you choose to post in this forum with, and thus are a noob when it comes to basketball. I don' t care how many teams you've "played around with", you've only rolled with 4 teams. Therefore you really have zero concept of wtf you're talking about. At least, you have nothing to back it up. You're almost like that naboimp guy who has 11 teams and shows up every 6 months or so to tell us why we're all wrong and the sim is perfect. It doesn't matter if you've played 47,000 teams in baseball, this is basketball, where you have 4 teams.
"You know what makes it easiest to make cookie-cutter teams? Low salaries. "
Since you've been around the site since 2003, please tell me the actual definition of a cookie-cutter team. From the context of and around this sentence, it appears that you don't.
"As you lower the cap (or raise salaries - same effect), you get more interesting and different combinations of players to try to piece something together within the restraints of the cap."
Again, you don't know what a cookie cutter is. Changing the cap and/or salaries just changes the cumulative totals and percentages an owner tries to achieve.
"I don't mean to speak for everyone, but I can't see why anyone would be interested in playing a game where it's so easy to make a team"
I agree that there is a joy to a good challenge, but you have to balance it with the whole 'what-if' idea that drives this site. It's long been known that if you want competition, you go to the theme leagues, while if you're new, you try out open leagues first. As it stands right now, newer owners will learn nothing from an open league and are less likely to stick around.
"(and thus everyone ends up making the same team that has no weaknesses)."
I've never seen this happen, and I've been in far more leagues than you. Besides, the standard everyone mistakenly calls cookie cutter had great weaknesses that repeatedly got abused by several owners like myself towards the end of the last roster.
"With lower salaries, it's too easy to be good at everything."
This is true, but nobody is arguing for that. We want a little flexibility. If I wanted to play as the 09-10 Lakers, I'd buy NBA 2K11.