Well at least the AFL is doing it right. No point 'expanding' if you're just going to see the club fail in 10 years and merge with some shitty Victorian club (oh hey Carlton...).
I mean, they probably went overboard with the mini-draft picks, never saw a reason as to why we needed these 17 year olds on lists (like Hogan and O'Meara) before they could play, if GC and GWS wanted senior players trade their normal picks, but other than that...
they needed to build a list, what would you want - a team full of SANFL, VFL and WAFL hacks? A team full of Sam Reids, Josh Frasers, Jared Brennans? There were only so many Ablett and Ward type players to go around.
The draft picks and rights to 17 year old picks (guys like Weller and McKenzie - played a year in the teams before they played AFL) were more than fair imo. They had a list of 45+ to build up to, and took plenty of punts on home grown talent that were at best 50-50 propositions.