But Term, most other teams have had 7 complete years meaning only 2 more than us (with the exception of WSW and jam tards)
I don't think our expectations are out of line but when as a club you are going to stick within the absolute limits and not take advantage of exceptions that other teams do, you instantly put yourself on the back foot.
From then on, how can you compete?
Compete? Or win the league? They're two different things.
Of course we can compete, and actually we do that reasonably well. In a ten team league, over the long run, our average finishing position should be 5.5 (as should every other team's). In our first 5 years our average finishing position was 6.2 (after adjusting for slightly different numbers of teams each year). Even if we finish last this year it will still be 6.8. So that's about right - we are about as competitive as could reasonably be expected.
The Welnix approach to winning the title, however, appears to be to try and gain some non-financial advantages to offset our financial disadvantages. For example, spend less money on players but spend it smarter, the "Moneyball" approach. Stein Huysegems was probably the first obvious attempt at this but has been a failure. We will have to do much better this off-season. Two other examples of non-financial advantages are the distance other teams have to travel to play us and our famed team spirit. Unfortunately both of those seem to have gone south on us this year.
The problem is that even if we can get some serious competitive advantages in these other areas they probably only bring us back to par. Unless the owners suddenly decide to open their wallets, and/or our crowds suddenly increase to Melbourne Victory levels then as fans I think we should only reasonably expect to win the league once every ten years, if that.
That fact doesn't bother me in particular. There's still room for plenty of good, entertaining football along the way, and we just make sure that we go appropriately nuts when we do actually win it.