1. Get rid of Projected Ratings. Replace with a scout tab on the player card where you receive feedback on players you sent a scout to visit. Give three tiers of response: Low (Gaining 0-20 points on average across key categories), Medium (Gaining 20-35), and High (Gaining >35). Example, "Season 12: After watching Joe Schmo play, I don't see much progression left in him" or "Season 8: After watching Joe Schmo play, he seems to have a lot of room for improvement still."
Cost: $25,000 per scouting trip
2. Stop giving me free scouting by constantly updating every player's current ratings. Why shouldn't I have to pay for this information? In the Soccer Dynasty, you scout a player to get his current ratings and you do not see his progression until you scout him again. This would do wonders in HBD where eveyone can simply see the progression a player has made and then extrapolate that out to figure where he's going to end up making Advance Scouting worthless. Update the ratings at rollover and at the All-star break for franchises you pay the money to see.
Cost: $250,000 per franchise (including your own), $250,000 for Free Agents Max Cost: $8.25M
So for $20M Advanced Scouting, you could scout 470 individual players to see progression potential and receive current rating updates on every player in the world. Or if you spend $0, you would see ? for every rating for every player, or the rating from whenever that last time was you scouted them.
3. Stagger progression of players. Right now, everyone is done progressing after year 4, other than random points here and there. Instead of that, make some players progress in years 1,2.5,6 or 2,3,4,7 with the other years being random points here and there. Also put players on either a 3, 4, or 5 year progression schedule. That way, you do not know for sure if a player's potential is topped out if he hasn't progressed in two years without sending a scout to see him.
International, College and High School now would just show you a certain number of players (and their current ratingsbased on how much you spent in the area. To find out the progression potential of these players you would need to send scouts out to see them perform to get the feedback. New players would be 20% Low, 70% Medium, and 10% High.
You wouldn't have to change the dynamics of when amatuer draft prospects show up, and internationals would still continue to show up throughout the year.