As I have thought about it more I have begun to think that the new progressive reduction of Research effectiveness for higher level players may work very well.
Right now as the higher lvl teams achieve 100's in the big 4 my weak teams are begginning to catch up. The proposed Research scheme would achieve this a little earlier in the season.
I'll be working on this tomorrow. The changes once implemented can be tweaked to any degree, e.g. we could make it twice as effective for a level 1 team to a level 20 one or 100x as effective (we'd never do that, but you get the point). Once it's implemented it is something we can tune to strike a balance across the game.