Really? I feel like Welfare is in a good spot right now. I think pre-hybrid it was a little too strong, especially with meta. Now, as a pension-earner myself, with the hybrid attributes it feels like I'm almost capped at about 700/800 TPA. With how the ratio's work, once you get to 80 or so in a stat it starts costing like a week's worth of pension to just get ~0.3 STHS attributes, which honestly feels really bad. Now this is just my experience, and I don't really claim things like press conferences or reviewing, so people can certainly get more TPE. But as a welfare player it feels like I can make a solid team player, I won't be outstanding, but I also won't be terrible, which I think is really healthy. If you look at the top 10 points leaders last season a majority of them were max earners, and only 1 I think could be classified as welfare. Same for S83. The top players are majority composed of max earners, so their work isn't really being devalued.
I think the argument can be different for the M, but GM's should be playing max earning players over welfare players anyways, and that's a GM standards discussion not really a welfare one.