how much consideration has been given to grassroots development as opposed to building from the top down?
There is no bottom up model in terms of revenue though.
The revenue will always be generated at the top and is the same in every sport.
We need to build the base and that is critically important but the reality is the dollars get earned at the top, and the elite end of the grassroots players want to become professional players and get professional opportunities, preferably here in Australia.
It's a difficult equation to balance and certainly we haven't got it right in the last few years with Super Rugby being bailed out to a substantial degree.
Lots of people ignore the fact though that the 5th Super Rugby team also gave us a greater share of the overall broadcast revenue though which includes money for Wallabies games (which is a much bigger sum than the Super Rugby portion of the deal).
If you weighed up the additional money spent bailing out the Super Rugby teams (in particular the Rebels) against the additional piece of the revenue pie we got at Super Rugby and test level, it would be much closer than people think.
I don't think there are any simplistic answers of where we go from here and what would create better results across the board for Australian rugby.
Certainly the ARU is culpable for so much that has gone wrong, particularly in the last two years and the structure of the game across the country with power vested in the State Unions (particularly NSWRU and QRU) and their desire to act in their own interests is a difficult proposition to fix.
I'm in no way convinced that a different group of board members at the ARU and different board members at the State Unions would come up with markedly different plans for how to manage everything.