100% agree with you.
Although only Gold Coast/Western Suburbs/South Sydney were the only teams with lower average home crowds than the Rams for 1998, Wests and Souths as you said had been in the comp for decades, as had the Bulldogs that only averaged 8363/home game, which is about only another 900 more fans than Adelaide.
It was a bad decision for the NRL to cut the Rams and unfortunately they will have to wait until the 2nd expansion (from 18 to 20 teams) before Adelaide is in consideration for an NRL franchise.
I feel that had Adelaide been admitted in the 1995 expansion, the Allan Langer coup eventuated and the ARL/NRL persevered with Adelaide, things would've panned out very differently for the Rams. However, the writing was on the wall and the end was nigh once Ch9 Adelaide stopped televising Rams home games after they moved from Adelaide Oval halfway through the 1998 season. With no coverage of the local team on television, Ch9 shafting RL matches into the graveyard slot at the same Adelaide's interest in AFL went through the roof off the back of the Crows first premiership in '97 (and then going on to win it again in '98)...I can now see why ParraFan and others say that the Rams unfortunately came into first-grade at the wrong time. Just like North Sydney's demise, everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Rams (e.g. in the case of the Gosford stadium construction, bad weather forced delays)
Had the Rams and Reds not been cut, the Melbourne Storm may have not formed until much later (as their inaugural squad was predominantly Western Reds and Hunter Mariners players, so in essence, the Storm was pretty much a Super League team). Perth will always go down as a "oh, what could've win" when you look at the inroads Rugby Union made once the Reds were dissolved, immediately playing a Wallabies test match at Subiaco the following year in 1998. All that ground Rugby Union gained since then is what should've belonged to rugby league, which makes it a bitter pill to swallow when you think about it.
