+1
I hope the competition really becomes quite even in the future as we all continue to train and improve :D
I believe it will.. And we'll at least seem to have some amount of "similar level teams" each Season, which effectively produces at least some amount of quite/very even matches.
It's great to be able to continuously compare your teams' success against other HG teams, and see where you currently are at, in your team/player development path.
Of course, it doesn't directly reflect only your development (if you compare success against some exact team year after year, as they might be developing with very high speed or then even declining in skills/salaries) if you do that, but it's still interesting to see how you fare against each given team, Season after Season.
But if you compare your total Regular Season success, then it gives you clue into which direction you're heading (vs. other HGL teams). Although it affects a lot (makes direct comparison of Season to Season success harder) that teams change from Season to Season, but still...
Importantly, the HGL continues to grow and improve...
I find the improving part to be way more important than "growing" part - as mentioned earlier, I think quality and manager commitment is way more important than quantity, especially in this kind of "all-manual-league". This becomes most evident to me, as I see what happens partly also 'behind the scenes' (only part of the requests send to managers by BBMail ever see the daylight in Official Threads), and how much it affects to the work load.
Everybody please remember, we've yet to had a single HGL pre-season without quite a lot of hassle with the match organizing and box score post-project - so ensuring quality and manager commitment first, and only after that is ensured, concentrating on possible expansions, is the way to go in my opinion. While this if a free-to-participate kind of league, it is essential that everyone does their own part to keep league running as optimally as possible, and I interpret it all being part of the respect towards the league. Having said that, I do the work in trying to find new teams for the future, especially as it seems to be the case that every Season someone decides to step out. This was the case with BC Rajaleidjad, who is now participating to Season 4 due to my invitation (which I'm glad Trailblazer accepted!).
Same logic doesn't luckily have to apply to HGL, that applies to capitalism (continuous growth is a demand in order to keep the system optimally functional). So if we'd be in a situation in a Season or two, where we'd again have 16 teams participating, I wouldn't see it a failure of any kind (of course to some extent depending on a reason why that would occur, but personally I don't feel like I've ever been very rude to anyone in BB and I don't plan to change that, so I don't think that should become the reason anyone would exit HGL).
And as for improving, while I'm person who likes to improve and optimize practically all the time (little things at the very least), still I also think there's wisdom in "don't fix it if it's not broken". So in other words, I don't see much new value being brought in by changing something for the sake of changing it (and I'm not implying you were referring to such change either, just to be sure you didn't get me wrong), but actually change can sometimes bring 'negative value', so I prefer to consider changes carefully.
But as has been said, it's good to see some managers putting in hours to make league better (I'm looking at you especially LennuK., with your help on some pre-season statistical tasks, and now taking care of these Round-to-Round stats that you publish after each Round).