BTW, I've always agreed with your position of "sign your damn draft picks", but I've always felt that that alone would not solve the problem. Excessive minor league retirements due to lack of promotions also contributed. Both of those things are symptoms of systemic bad owner behavior in HBD. And you're not going to change systemic bad behavior without offering some sort of effective incentive to the owners to change. "Doing the right thing" is not incentive enough to get people to change . . . if they already don't care, then labeling them as "part of the problem" is just going to be ignored. Which is exactly what has been happening.
I've offered some DITR changes as a possible incentive, i.e. only making draftees eligible for DITR, and the number of DITR's you get dependent upon how many draftees you sign, etc., but I don't think that would have been enough either unless they really ramped up the potential quality of DITR's. But we also don't want DITR to turn into a "free stud prospect" handout, as has been discussed ad nauseum.
In the end, I think tryout camp position players was an inevitable solution to a chronic problem (depleted minor league free agent pools) that was not going to be solved otherwise.