[MannyTrillo]

Here's another idea:

Start the league with a location "draft," where each owner chooses a city for his team, allowing cities to have more than one team. Afterwards, assign initial market size based on both the population of the city chosen, and how close the team is to other teams... so, for example, if only one team picks New York, they would have a "huge" market. But if someone else also picks New York, both teams would have a smaller market size.

If there was a team in some place like Phoenix, they would probably be "below average," unless there ended up being no other teams in the southwestern US... then they could get upgraded to "above average."

If you combine something like this with some creative rules about franchise relocation, I think it would be a neat addition.

As far as the other stuff goes, it does sound neat but I agree that it might be difficult to keep people interested... for that reason, I would suggest starting small, maybe 16 teams, and seeing how it goes from there.