Reg, that really is an excellent piece above post #97, well done. See, we can agree about something in Australian rugby about every 5 years or so
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Just as aside: I always note that assessments of the Darwin-like bent where it's all some grand macro story like 'the Wallabies have been in decline, doesn't matter who's coaching, etc, it's a kind of permanent inexorable down-trend pretty much in the nature of things as they've been for all this long period, kind of no one's responsibility really, etc', these assessment totally miss a very, very different interpretation of why things are the way they are and what can be done to make it not so.
And that counter interpretation is simple: namely, the supposed 'permanent cosmically-driven decline' is really just a trace line through a period where
_the actual quality of management of the code [or whatever] as a systemic whole declined_ and this explains why the symptom and not the cause is that of a playing group(s) under that management also declining as a result. Relatedly it can be so that the calibre of a sporting code's [or whatever's] competitive management system in the same period increased and enhanced itself, so the relative decline of one to the other is doubly magnified.
The inference being: fix the system's management competencies and its core flaws that sit over any defined system and you may well fix the derived results vs some kind of deathly, gloomy fatalism that 'it will always be downhill forever now no matter what anyone does from now on or has done hitherto'.
Take some examples: in the 1960s/1970s the macroeconomic trend lines for the British economy were horrendous and the universal view was they were negatively inexorably downwards, it was just so and could never be reversed, the modern British economic system was (as seen then) doomed to become a tiny fraction of, say, France's and Italy's and so on. Well, OK, but a woman called M Thatcher took charge in 1979, threw out lots of crap business leaders and civil servants, halved union power, changed the tax system, and in the space of ~ one decade the the British economy was transformed and reborn and this day is one of the best performing in Europe and the 5th largest in the world.
In Communist China all Western observers had it from 1949 to ~ 1990 that this economy would forever feed nothing but a peasant lifestyle with poverty if anything increasing with no hope ever in sight. Then the light went on for China's economic masters that they could drastically alter the governance model of the Chinese economy and induce a vibrant, liberated capitalist sub-system under a communist political control system. The rest is history and now we have a booming Chinese middle class dominating economic demand in Asia and fuelling global macro economic demand for decades now.
The point is this: look deep, find the real causes, the way you manage things may well be the reason your plants won't grow and everyone's getting more and more lost and unhappier. There is very little that is manmade that is truly inevitable and unalterable for the better.
Fix the system, fix the management, fix the model and, so often, what you thought was dying and going down forever, can likely be revived, reborn and made prosperous once more.
