I think a bit of both on first point mind you Hunslet have just appointed a full time employee to work in community and there has being a more concerted effort in trying to get people to come to games,the problem is the club don,t have the money to advertise like for a example against Blackpool a couple of week ago a adult could get into the game with a child for 5 pound but the club relied on word of mouth or volunteers to pass the forms round rather then advertising it in Yorkshire Evening post which would be due to lack of money i would guess.
On second point i really not sure if thats the case or not the Rhinos did pay for the scholarship scheme but that finished last season Hunslet get 100,000 a year from Rfl so i think it comes out of that. Iwould agree with that third point if you drive through Hunslet you would have no idea there was team based there who are semi-pro

I think a lot of it is the cost. £12 to see a game. For a team that is around non league standard in football its £7.

If you look at a lot of grounds most of them are the quality of non league grounds. Ok Doncaster, gateshead and hunslet have good stadiums.

It also doesnt help having massive gaps in the fixture list.

Hornets' ground is better than most in SL, too.

Really don't think ticket price is the main reason. Near me, it's £13 to watch Histon United in the conference (and £14 to watch Cambridge, also in the conference). Histon's "stadium" is capacity 3000 odd, comparable to plenty of lower division RL grounds. RL teams play considerably fewer games than non-league football clubs, so the total cost over a season is still quite a bit less.

As a thought experiment - if Hunslet (or any other C1 club) had free admission for a game, what difference do you think it would make to the crowd? I think you'd still see less than 1000 people there.

I don't think you can really apply the same solution to all of those clubs. The problem at say Hunslet, Swinton or Rochdale (it seems to me) is one of long-term decline; most of their fans seem to be people who were introduced to RL several decades ago and the problem is how to reconnect to the local community. Even the "expansion" clubs - Skolars, Gateshead, S. Wales don't have the same issues when it comes to building a fanbase. Most people currently watching Skolars are people who play RL (& their families) and/or people from a RL background who live in the south east. Most people watching S.Wales are (I suspect) people who watch Rugby Union in the winter.

Agree that the fixture list situation really does no favours to Championship 1 clubs.

As I said earlier

Marketing is the key , but the clubs have neither the money or the knowhow of where to start

... but the fact remains that the public of Doncaster seem dis-interested.

I think your mistaking Rugby League with soccer.
However, I live 2 miles from the Dewsbury ground and you really wouldn't know they existed if you weren't a league fan already.