A really important matter! I personally wouldn't want HGL to be completely closed to any managers currently not participating in the league and have genuine interest in enriching the league. I think engaging more people in this little HGL project could have somewhat of an impact for BB's future, where this might be implemented directly into the game (at least that's what I'm rooting for). It would be great to see Hadar returning to the league after a short absence and perhaps welcoming further managers here too.
On the other hand, currently most of the work falls on Wagner's plate and I'm just not sure if this could be sorted out by a regular vote. [...]
To reply only to a part of your message for now, just as I replied to WiMaOl, this thing won't be solved perfectly by a vote.
Voting won't bring more time nor resources.
But it would make HGL what some might have wished for, an open league in a realistic sense of a word. Then, if you're better than worst HGL team on that Season, you have a chance to enter HGL. This is how many IRL leagues function too. Yes, in many leagues also second worst (or with big number of teams in some leagues, even 3 or 4 teams can be facing relegation, but as I mentioned, I strongly think that's way way too much and I don't want to "reward" committed and rule obeying HGL managers with such "reward") are facing relegation threat, but as said, that's too much of a negative impact for committed HGL teams.
You mentioned "I think engaging more people in this little HGL project could have somewhat of an impact for BB's future, where this might be implemented directly into the game (at least that's what I'm rooting for)."
Yes, I also hope that it would be implemented in a base game some day (if done properly). However, two aspects that maybe should be considered here:
Quality always over quantity. It doesn't speak well for the league, if quality is lessened just in order to make it bigger.
Rather keeping quality at as high level as possible (and possibly still opening doors to both ways in terms of relegation threat), but making people understand there are some capacity limits (due to work amount restrictions) gives out a message hopefully also to BB owners/devs, that this is what it can optimally be but can't expand in team numbers, and if you make it BB-wide solution, just automate it to the BB base game, in some sense 'give us your muscles and expand on this in terms of team amount'.
Of course I understand what you wrote (and reasoning behind that as well), but I just think concentration should first and foremost be in retaining as high standards, quality and content as possible.
For exaxmple giving up on HGL team stats would be huge blow to myself (and would lose tens of hours of base work needed to get it up and running) and would mean lot less meaningful content for HGL as I love stats. Everybody can just see how much match amounts would go up with 20 or 22 teams (remember, stats collection also is added that amount of work in addition to everything else).
20 would be the absolute max I think, but please don't expect that change to take place at least on Season 6. As I've written multiple times, I don't even prefer these 3 games weeks at all, let alone play them half of the Season.
3 managers that have now been BB-Mailed haven't yet commented on whether they want to continue on Season 6.