OK, more than a couple of thoughts. A nice "too long" comin' up.
First, I started this round of conversation because okp brought up the goalie TOI issue in his state of the league sitemail prior to the draft. In the draft I saw it as an opportunity to open debate on it. That's all it was. I am not an advocate of any drastic change to this league.
The main reason I think something might be done about the way we are using goalies is that right now it's fairly cosmetic. We find one or two that do the job and stick with them. There's no roster movement, and certainly no trading. I think if we could get a little of those things going it would be good for the league. I did not anticipate - at all - owners who would be resistant to roster movement. Different strokes; lesson learned. But I don't actually see changing goalie TOI as doing much to enhance scoring, unless we made it so drastic that there would be an influx of really poor goalies, and no one wants that.
Now, about using a new version of the sim. The one we use in this league is a few generations old as you know. I think the prospect of changing the engine has just as much if not more capacity to revise our gameplay, than messing with something like goalie TOI. And - what if it came with a side effect, like we'd have to lose all our league records to switch over, or similar?
So of course we'd like to run some test sessions before we made a decision - would Mike Welch have the resources to do that for our single league? Might not exactly be a priority. And anyway, the current engine is still very much skewed toward D-ratings. The "new" engine we've heard about being tested for awhile now seems like it's nowhere near ready for release IMO. Which is why, of all the issues I've discussed here, I haven't bothered to address that one.
And yes, blee, it's the d ratings. I don't really want to start talking about scoring again because it's the real hot button. I don't care what the scores are in this league. My team can't score worth a damn anyway.