Yeah I get your point but doubt that club would want to go down that route to be honest."The better players" you mention are judged according to their schoolboy footy skills and draft camp results.
The advantage with bringing in 6 rookies is that the club can see how they respond to the club environment, how they cope with being a full time professional athlete, and the club getting a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses by testing them in-house.
And then just prior to the start of season next year two lucky rookies can be elevated (as what happened with Hudson and Frost at the start of the 2013 season).
What's complicating that is that we get two LTI elevations anyway for Caff and Scharenberg. I'd have thought that Gault would get one of those.
So if we do go down the "maximum rookie" route then we'll have 7 rookies (6 cat A: Gault + 5 newbies; 1 cat B: Cox) and we can elevate 4 at start of the year, 1 mid year, and 2 will need to go back onto the rookie list when Caff and Scharenberg come back.