Your suggestion for rookies sounds like the approach used in the traditional leagues. My experience is that a good team can pick up some quality rookies in that draft. However, the poor teams continue to get the best selections, which is the source of many of the respondents' complaints.

If you eliminate rookies from the monthly wire, what is left is usually low quality so why worry about an elaborate ping-pong ball mechanism. Let the poor suckers who can't seem to win have first pick.