Another distinction that is seldom mentioned, if it ever has been, is some game owners know baseball, know the real players, historical or not and are entitled to feel comfort in managing personnel with which they literally have histories, as The Wolf noted.
On the other hand, I'm sure there are numerous game owners who may wish they were fans of real baseball, knew the real players, etc... but gain their fulfillment from simply being managers, or GMs; just manipulating the talent pool and proving their personnel skills. For them, it's less about who's-done-what than it is what-can-I-do. Many of us, like kckid4u said, develop those leagues from scratch and build our teams around our own philosophies, thus creating our own teams and the success of those choices end up being a direct reflection of our management skills, tangible or intuitive, rather than a reflection of how well we manage established talents with well-known names.
Just as real-life eventually becomes fictional so, in a sense, fictional becomes real life, at least with respect to managing known factors in much the same way as players of present renown. Eventually, the future Hall-of-Famers are known to us, too. And we're just as disappointed when he suddenly hits 15 HR instead of the 30+ that, "historically", we would have expected.
Funny game, isn't it? We're more the same than we realize, IMHO. What I do agree with, wholeheartedly, is that any of these areas would make drastic headway if they were the only areas focused upon. Markus' balancing act has been oddly successful. While I don't play historicals or use real rosters, I know that the clientele who do are important to his gains and the future of the game. Consequently, they're important to me, just less so.
