Great that they are making efforts to improve HBD. Even if they turn out to create equal or greater problems, I'm all for trying. Any changes can be reversed or changed again if they don't work out.
My concern is one of these changes is going to further the advantages people get from brute force & more time on the game, vs making the game more about strategy.
If I'm understanding this correctly, we'll still all be able to get historical ratings for every player if we want them and have 15-30 minutes to spare once a season.
Bring up a screen (such as Trade Proposal) that shows current ratings of players on other teams. Screen print, copy/paste, or export. Do that once a season, and you've got every player's ratings every season.
If development patterns vary, this many not be terribly valuable. My assumption is if development patterns will vary or can be more impacted by coaching and such, they wouldn't bother to try to hide former rating numbers from us.
Thus, GMs who know how to write code that screen scrapes data and load it into a spreadsheet and have been in a world for several seasons may have an even bigger advantage than they do today.
If development is really going to vary (ex., late bloomers, 1st round busts, some 5th round picks become starters, etc.) and it's going to be impacted by thing we can control (coaching, training & medical budget, playing time, playing at appropriate level, making the MinL playoffs, etc.) then wouldn't the game be better if GMs could learn from each other?
For example, wouldn't it better if a new GM, or someone with just 1 team who's been playing for a while, could see that coaching really helps? Or that higher draft budgets results in a better chance of drafting an ML player in the middle rounds or a stud in the 1st round?
If it's all hidden, most of us will never have a large enough sample set to figure out what works and what's a waste of time and resources. So the game because more about guessing. Like coaching hiring is today.