This morning I have made it all the way to the beginning of January in my Modern Day MyEra and I can address some of the following issues.
1. The hardship exception - If you start from opening night and you put the proper injuries on the Memphis Grizzlies players (example - Morant (suspension), Clarke (Torn Achilles), Adams (Knee Surgery)) assign the players either the exact injury they have or something close it that will force them to have the red health symbol indicating they wont be allowed to play in any games.
The hardship exception kicks in AFTER the Grizzlies 5th game. This is when you can sign Bismack Biyombo. Now here is the issue that I ran into. I was not able to use the hardship exception to sign Shaquille Harrison or Jaylen Nowell to 10 day contracts AND in the game I was forced to release Biyombo I think it was 11/23 in the game, but I was able to re-sign him on 11/24 using the hardship exception because again I had injuries to players that they werent able to play.
2. In regards to protection on draft picks, I was just fooling around with the trade finder tool and if I select to trade a second round draft pick a pop up window comes up saying "Confirmation - please select the protection you want to put on this pick" and it gives you 3 options: unprotected, swap best or swap worst. If I select to trade first round draft pick a pop up window comes up saying "Confirmation - please select the protection you want to put on this pick" and it gives you the following options: unprotected, top 3 protected, top 5 protected, top 10 protected, lottery protected, swap best, swap worst.
3. I haven't tried the rookie scale extensions so I will have to just save myera file to another file and use that one as a testing file.
4. In regards to not being able to initiate trades with the best/worst swaps, do you mean you can't initiate trades with picks that have best or worst swaps already assigned to them?
I think that these little issues should be a priority to get fixed in this game mode if not sometime during 2k24, especially for 2k25. Adding a new feature to the game mode here and there isn't going to just make these little issues go away, so I think it's important to put the focus on things that if it's possible to correct to focus on those first.