In my view, EE issues could be fixed by two (relatively simple) tweaks: (1) significantly increase the number of players with a late signing preference, especially in the top 250/300 players; and (1) significantly decrease the "strength" of APs compared to HV/CVs, so that their main effect is for "unlocking" recruits. That would allow someone like chapel/buddha to unlock more players in phase 1, and they don't have a (nearly) insurmountable AP lead to overcome in phase 2.
While I personally like chapel's early declaration idea, it seems like that would involve more coding/changes to the game engine (that said, I'm not a computer programmer, so maybe I'm wrong about that).