Let me give a real example of why the current process sucks -
Most days, I check on my HBD teams several times a day. But sometimes I have real-world responsibilities that prevent that. Family, work, travel. Stuff like that.
Last week, I had one of those days. Could not log in for 12-16 hours. And didn't have time to look at coaches & make offers the last time I could check in.
That day lined up with the day coaches start to accept offers.
I have almost all of my good P prospects in AA. Not because I'm trying to scam the system. It's partly because that where they belong based on how they were acquired, age, projections, etc. And it's partly based on this exact same thing happening last season, so I consolidated Ps that would have been spread between Rookie & LowA to HiA. I promoted them all from HiA to AA at the end of last season.
I budgeted money to get a very good AA P Coaching. Made the top offer to the best 2 available.
In the 12-16 hours I was away, I lost top ranking (s**t happens). Every reasonable AA P coach signed at AA or AAA or ML BP. All that was left under AA P Coach was 2 crap coaches with P rating in the low 40s and crap for other attributes. They would have been below average in Rookie League.
There were a few better options left at HiA, but they were below average by AA standards.
There were plenty of P & BP Coaches without offers at the ML & AAA levels. I made some of them offers of over 4X what they were asking. They were refused.
Best option the game gave me was, in the last hiring cycle, to offer my entire remaining coaching budget ($1,004,000) to the best HiA P coach left to take the AA job. (Because of one of the other silly aspects of this game, Transfer Penalty, there's no reason to leave anything less than $2M in the coaching budget at the end.)
And I got him. Awesome!
If the Patience & Discipline ratings really mean anything, my AA P coach is the worst P coach in my organization. If I could promote / demote my coaches, I could make it better, but that's not an option either.
And of course there are lots of better AAA & ML P coaches still available after they can't be signed. I find it hard to consider this a MLB simulation when it works like this. I doubt there are any people out there looking for a coaching job that would turn down $1M a year because they wanted to work at AAA and the $1M offer was at AA.
So now I have to either promote my AA Ps early, risk them being ruined by a bad coach, or risk them being ruined by a demotion penalty. The HBD help pages say it's best to promote about once a season, but the way coach hiring works probably makes that a bad strategy a lot of the time.
My first suggestion is to change the way coach works. In any way. It would be hard to make it a less fun or rational than it is now.
I would prefer setting one or more Coaching Budgets, just like we do for Scouting, Medical, & Training. We don't hire individual scouts, doctors, or trainers. I don't see why we need to hire individual coaches. I'll be not 1% of HBD players can name a single one of their coaches without looking it up. Hiring coaches just isn't fun. There are a few tricks that can be exploited, but that's just one more way the HBD players with lots of experience have an 'unfair' advantage over newer players.
Next best option would be to eliminate coaches refusing to coach at a lower level if it's their best offer. That system could be gamed, too. In my situation, if the market dictated, I could have offered millions to the best available P coach for my AA job instead of an ML job. That might not be perfect either, but it 's better than the way it works now.
The player development process is overly predictable. If WIS was really going to invest in HBD beyond a few cosmetic changes, they could fix development & coaching hiring/impact in one release.