Creating a 14-team top tier and asking a promoted side to pay for the privilege is not in the best interests of English rugby
When the Premiership abandoned the first-past-the-post system to determine the champions and replaced it with play-offs in 2002-03, the justification was that the league table was not necessarily a barometer of form because some clubs were more disrupted by international calls than others during the league campaign.
The overlap between domestic and international rugby in the autumn and during the Six Nations meant some clubs could be without players for more than a third of the season and then there were rest weeks to factor in. Play-offs, never mind that a league turned into a knockout tournament, were determined to be the better way to decide who was the best.