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Nunyer said essentially what I was going to. You can't talk about what the OOTP AI should do with Trade Block players without first talking about which players should be on the Trade Block to begin with, which is why I didn't think the previous discussion made much sense.
Of course there is no official 'trade block' in real life, so there's no real life model to follow. For me, the real question is: what do OOTP users want the trade block to be? I certainly don't want it to be what it is now - a list of really bad grossly overpaid players I would never want to trade for. What's the point of that? Instead I want to see a list of players an AI team is taking offers on - a quick overview of veterans I might be able to pick up from rebuilding teams at the trade deadline (so I don't need to scour every roster in the league), or an arb-eligible star that a rebuilding team a few years from contending has decided to move for a big package of prospects in the offseason. For the Block to work that way, though, AI GMs need to be smarter; they need to understand short and long term goals, and need to be able to evaluate how players fit those goals.
And when good players end up on the Trade Block, AI teams need to compare the value of what a human GM is willing to offer with the value of what other AI teams are willing to offer. One reason trading is easier than it should be in OOTP is that you're never bidding against anyone but yourself.
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