Superleague is BOOMING in St Helens................................

Getting rid of the salary cap won't work as half the teams in Superleague don't spend the cap now?
Make all clubs have an Academy to bring more youngsters through, The winners of past Superleague titles have all had Academy's to fall back on.
Up the salary cap a bit but not a huge amount.

The idea that you could just merge the two Hull teams and suddenly have a club with a 15-20k average crowd is a myth, far too much history and bad feeling for that ever to happen.

The derbys themselves also generate big gates and SL has used the derby many times at the Magic Weekend as they know it draws a crowd.

Lol. Hull didn’t “merge” with Gateshead. They took them over so they could retain their super league status and were also paid £1.25m in handouts

That's my point. It was on the cards for the 1996 season, but never formed as no-one, in the whole of the Rugby League fraternity, wanted it to happen.

This was well before Magic Weekend was ever dreamt up.

Who said they did? Are you making false narratives up in your head again?

Well, I'm biased, but I think it all started to go downhill when it went from 14 to 12 teams, losing the Bradford support & media interest & Leeds derby and losing the London presence at the same time. Not a good day for media sales.
With hindsight, they should have tied the salary cap into the TV rights - if TV rights go up by 20% then the cap should go up by the same. It means the cap would only change every 5 years or so, allows forward planning.
More divisive I think, would have been bringing in a cap floor - whereby every club commits to paying 90% of the cap space.