SteveP, this is very very helpful, thanks for taking the time to educate me!
The info regarding the market/financials is especially helpful--very interesting how it works.
After following the link to the discussion you recommended, I think it may be the case that if I did rig the draft to let the era-dominate teams go first, they would load up on star fictional talent, which would result in a larger salary load, which would cause the AI, after the draft, to adjust the market detail to support that. So in some sense, it would achieve the basic result I want, without necessarily being completely faithful to history.
Thanks for the heads up on making any market adjustments incrementally--I was prepared to go in there and start making some pretty large "corrections", but knowing now that this would generate some odd AI behavior will make me more cautious.
As for the rule tweaking, I think I will follow your advice, ie, keep everything on but adjust to 12/4.
Perhaps OOTP 10 will make some of these tweaks easier to make...