Tier switching system needs updating

I want to move back down to the Rookie tier I belong in...

...I've recently joined igp and completed my first season in the British Every Day racing league (50%). Now there were 32 cars on the grid, however only 6 cars would finish as quite clearly everyone else had given up and stopped playing. I finished 3rd in the season and found myself in the pro tier for the 2nd season; however I switched leagues because I wanted to play against more than 4 other cars however when I do so I go straight into the Pro tier and am greatly out of my depth (I'm currently lvl 4) and cannot go back to the Rookie class without resetting my account, which would force me to give up on all the research and training etc etc. Now I know a lot of you would say cut your loss and do the reset but that makes me worse off, I could just join another league and get myself relegated to the Rookie tier at the end of the season which would end soon. However I'm here to compete don't want to pussy foot around the system, making sure everyone in the league is playing and penalising myself due to other people who can't be bothered to play anymore. 
Lets use this thread to come up with suggestions to how this could be fixed, here are two ways:

1) Not allow anyone under lvl 6 enter a pro tier
2) Kick any inactive driver who hasn't entered the last 5 consecutive races from the league

You aren't the only one to fall into the trap of joining an almost full league only to find out there are only a couple of active players, been there, done that. I would suspect a few new players have done the same thing and dropped out never to return.

I can understand your frustration and agree the system could do with being changed but both of your suggestions could cause a knock on effect.

1) This would work providing a league isn't full but in a full league no rookie promotion would mean no pro relegation as there wouldn't be room for them. However i haven't seen a league which has all 3 tiers full of active players for quite a while so I think it's currently viable and a good idea.

2) Because of the need for a certain number of teams in a tier to enable promotion I can understand why some managers keep a few non-active players in the league. There are tier caps built in, for instance because my league didn't have enough players for promotion I am stuck in pro but there is a cap of 12 for pro so I can't move up to level 13 until I'm promoted to elite. The other consequence of this is it makes it harder for players newly promoted to pro to compete with me because the time and number of races I've had for training gives me a significant advantage. I don't like doing it but I'm having to deliberately keep some inactive players to release the logjam and allow promotion to work as it should.

I wonder whether server operated teams would be a good idea to pad out leagues so there are always enough to enable promotion. That way active managers wouldn't have the dilemma of whether to keep inactive players and those who haven't entered the previous 5 races could be kicked automatically.