Historical Development/Fielding Question
 

I'm back from a 2-year hiatus, and haven't played OOTP since version 18. I wanted to ask a question about whether any settings have changed to alter the way I have previously approached the following goal:

I'm playing a Historical scenario where I keep players with their historical abilities overall, *but* I need to be able to let players learn new positions to prevent altered rosters across the league from placing a bunch of 0-experience players at positions that they clearly should be physically capable of learning/playing.

My understanding is that they only way that I can deal with that is to turn on the Development engine, and manually re-tune the player ratings in commissioner mode "back" to their initial ratings for everything other than position experience as the season goes on. Is this still the case, or is there an easier way for me to accomplish my goals now?