The MLBTR piece puts an optimistic spin on a trade for Price. It says there about 7 teams interested in Ryu and suggests that the Sox will have multiple potential partners for Price, and that the Sox could expect teams to be willing to pay $20 mill * 3 of his contract.
The lux tax is not going to disappear altogether, no chance. Players realize that having a lux tax is much better than having a hard cap.
Maybe the rates are reduced a bit and the thresholds pushed up a bit.
The question is how baseball revenues continue to rise when attendance and viewership are apparently dropping. That's why I raised the 'partnerships' thing as a possible explanation.
As far as obvious concrete examples go, you can't do any better than the '16 Cubs and the '17 Astros. Both teams somewhat notoriously tanked for a few years, scoring high draft picks that were integral to building championship teams.
It's one of those things that's just obvious.
When we talk about the farm, what we're really talking about is being successful at scouting, drafting and developing players.