No doubt. The NFL does just fine without a lottery system.
If you suck that bad, cool, take your #1 pick. And agreed, just make it spaced out so you can only get it every few years.
No. I'm in favor of simple reverse order. It works for baseball and football. You can't do it in basketball because one player can literally turn a team around in the NBA. Like Lebron himself made Cleveland a contender. He left and they were worst in the league. He came back and they were a contender. He left again and they're the worst in the league again.
Hockey is closer to the other two in terms of the effect one player can have on a roster.
I'm not just saying it because Detroit is at the bottom right now. If a team is so bad they get multiple high draft picks in a row, the fans will/should start to revolt. The bigger problem of Edmonton getting multiple 1OAs in that short span is that they weren't the worst team in the league for each of those years. They lucked into 1OAs that they shouldn't have gotten. Or now with New Jersey where they got a couple 1OAs through luck rather than being the worst team in the league. If you are spacing out picks so bad teams don't keep getting the best players... you should just keep the lottery. The whole point of reverse order is so that teams who were the worst get the most help to get better.
We had a couple GMs latch onto the idea of "we won't be better than mediocre, so let's just tell fans that we will suck for awhile and hope they buy in" in Hinkie and whoever was running the show in Houston for the Astros. And we had entire fanbases completely discount anything except for winning a title. If you're an 8 seed going into the playoffs, you might as well just lose out prior to that and get your 1% chance at a top pick instead of a 10% chance you might shock a team.
Rebuilding should not be a multi-year tear the foundation down and we will be an abomination for a sustained period. That is where we are at in sports nowadays and with the salary cap and needing to offer term to get guys to go anywhere, it's a reality of the system. But it shouldn't fall to "we're going to be so bad we are unwatchable for about three years and then maybe we can look ok".
Give me more Billy Beanes who try to win at the rigged game by doing something unique like targetting undervalued players as opposed to Sam Hinkie's let's be so bad that we have no other choice than to get good players and just hope to god the fans are there on the other side.