Sometimes injuries or trades open up roster holes that can't be filled during free agency in season, and sometimes you draft eleventeen pitchers.

Well, unless your worlds work differently than mine, you're only seeing 2-5 IFA per day at the maximum. 

And, even then, they're not signing for 3-4 real life days anyway.   If an IFA has been sitting out there, with no bids, for a week, he'll have reduced his demands and he'll sign on the next cycle.

The system works fine.  Its not like real baseball because, as many other have said, prospects are too much of a sure thing.  Minimum win requirement fix most of the other problems except the realism one.   The lack of draft busts is another realism problem we all have learned to live with because this is a game and you cant sim the mental side of the game.  See Lebron James for the mental side of sports playing a huge factor. 

Huge budget transfers, multiple IFA signings and high dollar contracts can be prevented.   I think that's sort of the point of the thread. 

I think 50% of the IFAs should appear during the "sign free agent phase."  They could be anywhere from age 18 to 25.  The IFAs wouldn't be seen until this stage begins, so you don't know when setting budgets if the best IFAs will be "regular free agents".  Let everybody see them, no matter if you have a $0 international budget or a $20 million, let the international scouting budget determine the projected ratings, but NOT whether or not you see the player.  Any signing bonus comes out of current player salary, NOT prospect. 

Once spring training begins teams will begin seeing the rest of the IFAs and the process would be as it is right now... ie if you have $0 international scouting, you won't see the other 50%, signing bonus comes out of prospect, etc...

What this accomplishes:
1) Less liklihood and maybe less incentive for the $35 million prospect budget to sign the biggest IFA stud, so maybe he puts more money in players than he otherwise would have.
2) Spreads the talent around.
3) Say a serious tanker nabs the biggest stud IFA during the free agent phase.  It's gonna cost him probably $10 bonus and 5-year ML contract at $10-12 million per season.  The extra $10 million salary the next season is going to impede the liklihood and hopefully the incentive to tank again and go for a huge IFA.  These types of contracts are not necessarily realistic but it adds some fun and strategy to the game and might give less incentive to tank (I personally believe that someone who wants to tank is going to tank no matter what the rule is on prospect budget and I've seen people tank with $12million in prospect and I've seen NOT tank with $40 million in prospect).

With the 'doubling of WIFS staff', I thought I'd bump this thread.  Good ideas here.  I support:
1.  Single bid
2.  All demands start at $1M and decrement with a lack of bids.
3.  Random signing times - some sign first demand.

Relative to some other ideas, non-payroll budgets not able to be seen by other owners.

Yep