I think there are a few reasons why there are less points.
1- game is dominated by possession. The team with less than 50% of the ball wins f#$k all games. So good teams don't take risks with the rock. Bad teams worry about scoring points and good teams worry about stopping them.
2- At the moment the little men are being trained up to play robotic footy because Bellyache and Des know that possession footy wins comps. Add Bennett to that list too. How many points do you expect teams to score when they rarely pass the ball in their own half? Shaun Johnson looks like a breath of fresh air. His background is influenced by touch footy, not purely RL. Same deal when Benji arrived. Small men can still have a huge influence late in matches but it relies on both them and their coach growing some balls. When the Roosters made their GF run their 3 little men played "us 3 versus the rest" in the last 20 minutes of matches and won. Straight up the middle through the big men. Small men do have a big influence on the game but only once the hard work is done. And teams spend a great deal of time working out how to negate small men, they are usually the best and most important players in a team.
3- the defence is better than ever. If you watch the defensive drills teams do at training it is so advanced compared to 20 - 30 years ago. The ball travels through the hand at about the same speed it always has but the defenders move faster in every direction and are better tacklers. They can wrestle, get numbers to tackles, stop the ball, and most importantly control the speed of the play the ball.
We all know that defence wins premierships too. More interchanges could mean more points which means more highlights. But rule changes won't change the fact that the best coaches spend more time coaching defence than they do attack. When the good teams play each other scores will be low. When the rubbish teams play each other the scoreboard will go double time.
What guarantee do we get about scoring more points with less interchanges? Will coaches just bring in more Dallas Johnson type players who can tackle all day? You can't tell me having more players like that with absolutely no attacking skill will increase the number of points. They can bring in more small men but then you have more targets in defence. Coaches don't like that, they'll probably want more tacklers than small men if fatigue is a greater factor.
If big men are pushed to the limit won't teams look to protect them? That would mean doing even less with the ball early in the game. Will possession be even more important and teams will throw the ball around even less? I don't want a sh!t boring game until the final 20 minutes just to watch a fresh small man come on try to target a prop.
Giving the small men a better go kind of means reducing the level of the game. Less interchange will mean players falling off tackles, poor kick chases, softer hit ups and tackles, more fatigue driven errors, slower play the balls, slower scrums, more kicks into touch or dead. It's a hell of a trade off to see a couple of players in each team get a chance to run amok.
