Hello,
I posted a thread around the week of Halloween requesting for manual promotion and relegation and was informed through being linked to this post that the reasoning was to get people to have more fuller leagues.
I think it's more likely to chase off our league of 7-10 committed Managers to something else (Bat Racer, god forbid) than it is anything else as we either all have to make burner accounts that and play them/leave them sit just to bump our teams up one by one into higher tiers, as we've run thru multiple seasons in Rookie now.
Great game, honestly, just a very big turn-off. I would really like to see this option return, or at least an option for league admins to be able to manually promote teams at the end of each season.