I have to say, it's disappointing to see the attitude HAM is taking towards this. After what happened in the offseason, i thought that we had collectively agreed that these PA-SC-shenanigans are something that can severely hurt the league as a whole and that a) we need to look for substantial technical/engine solutions to this problem and b) that GMs would enter into sort of a gentlemans agreement to not take advantage of these loopholes while the league is still working on the fixes. I even thought that something like what was suggested in the OP had already been established to a certain extent as a stopgap, but I guess I misremembered.

But apparently HAM decided to say screw that, ignore the whole "overall well-being of the league" thing and instead decided to focus on maximizing their own advantage they could get out of this situation. Which, by all means, is not against the rules or anything, but don't be so sanctimonious and expect people to be happy about it and like you for it. You were presented with a choice "Do we do what is good for the league, or do we do go what is good for us?", and you chose the latter, it's as simple as that. For the second time, by the way.

When you originally discovered the exploit I could have given you the benefit of the doubt, because looking for an advantage over other teams is part of a GMs job and we can't blame you for coming up with a creative and perfectly legal way to accomplish that. But since then it has become very clear how this exploit negatively affects the overall health of the league in numerous ways, but even though we have this knowledge now, you are still sticking to the plan to a certain extent. Of course we can't expect you to put points into attributes that you know will likely make your player worse, but you are still using the current system to rush your players to the SC max, leave PA untouched or even use regression to drop players PA ratings, making the most of our current broken system. Again, perfectly legal but certainly not helpful considering the overall situation of the league, and therefore not popular.

I give you that this series against Buffalo doesn't really count as proof for the argument against you though because you are right, flukes happen in STHS and in the playoffs no matter what and shit can be quite random with such a small sample size. We have no way of knowing how much the build changes influenced the results or goalie performances, the Conference Winner sweeping the Wildcard team certainly isn't something super crazy.  Don't let NOLA hear that though.