Judging by some of the responses to this thread, one would get the impression that a magic treasure chest filled with an endless supply of cash to sustain widespread full time RL exists, and that it can be tapped into at any time. How come I haven't heard of it?

Money (or rather the lack of it) is one reason why we can't have two full time divisions of ten teams, but the lack of available talent is a crucial factor, and again, some seem to think that we have access to the same player pool as more popular sports such as football and RU, when we clearly do not. RU can sustain P and R as they have a player pool of over 2.5 million; while RL has just over 100,000. This means that there simply isn't enough talent to go around, and combined with the poor junior coaching that Him alludes to, it's no wonder we have to import mediocre Australians to fill the pool up and barely sustain one full time division.

Thats a very valid point but in our recent discussion with Sheikh Onamaface the lack of guaranteed p&r killed the deal.

Interesting. When we were negotiating with Baron von moneylaundering, it was the fact that he could almost guarantee getting a team into SL by building the right club infrastructure, rather than having to depend on the lottery of a small set of playing results that made the idea so attractive to him.

Thats quite interesting, do you think its a cultural thing between Germans and Arabs or historical, due to one having one and the other not?

No.