Overreach should be penalized, and it was silly if Spud thought with a D2 program that he could reach that high and not get challenged for the recruit, especially within a game dynamic where EVERY SCHOOL, D1 through D3, can see the contested player.
Order of action isn't even really an issue here. If Spud was the first coach on the guy, he should have known there was a strong likelihood that someone else would come along given the magnitude of the player involved. Heck, his usual line of advice to people with EE's is to quit whining and plan for backups. Well, guess what, the same advice applies here. Proceed to Plan B, immediately. If both players came in together or Spud thought he could somehow fight and overtake a human-coached program from a higher division, then that's not a system flaw, it's a strategy flaw by the user.
Someone tried to reach into the candy jar, got their fingers smacked. That's exactly how it should be. Don't blame the jar or the candy store owner for what was, on its face, a poor strategic decision.
There's a host of talent available in 3.0 that's not available to D2 programs in 2.0 if you know how to ID it and, most importantly, which fights you stand a chance of winning. Every player on my UMSL beta rosters has been a player I haven't had to battle for because I located high-potential players that were likely to escape notice, avoided ones that were battle magnets and was judicial in my decisions for when to move on when D1 programs moved in on players I was on early. That's two Final 4's and an Elite 8 without a single roll of the dice needing to happen. If beta goes one more season, I have a kid on roster right now that, depending on off-season improvement, could make a push for a 900 overall rating There's no "disadvantage" unless your definition of being disadvantaged means you cant get exactly the player you want when you want.
The top D2 programs five years into 3.0 will, barring any changes, dwarf the all-time best D2 programs this game has seen assembled since before my arrival on the scene in 2009. The magnitude leap at the D3 level will, I suspect, be even greater for those who figure out the nuances. I'm not making a good/bad call on that, only saying that it will happen barring a massive influx of humans to fight over recruits.