I would guess that when people sim they don't practice, just hit sim to next season. That's what I did in my tests (posted a video on page 1).
The truth is that none of that stuff really matters. The problem is simply that XP packages do not rise in cost enough and some are too cheap all together.
XP will come to your players in one way or another. Eventually everyone will have a nice stack XP. Its what you can do with that XP that is the problem.