Is the French Top 14 doing the Aviva and thereby England a massive financial favour?

This thought has been swimming round me for a good while now. Is the financial wealth of of the French Top 14 perversely of benefit to the English Aviva? For various reasons the French Top 14 is globally the richest competition outside of the international game in all forms of rugby - quite a statement.
In comparison with England I believe this is becuase of the relative strenght of football in the two nations(football is obviously king in England) and due to the historical split in the game and how that has effected both countries. In England there are two seperate professional rugby codes and though I am not entirely clear of the evolution of french league, it is clear it nolonger competes in size with the Top 14. Undoubtedly there are other reasons however structurally I believe these two are significant.
Therefore given the financial dominance of the French you would expect the relationship to have detrimental consequences for the English? Well thats not how I see it, because as long as the Aviva sides, in concert with the RFU can hold on to their players then the undoubted player drain to France will still occur but it wont be in the main english players who take the euro. And this means more places for young English players to develop in the Aviva as they wont have to compete with every tom dick or harry from overseas looking for a pension or a professional contract of employment that might not be available to them at home. And ofcourse that means the more talent that is able to develop in the league the more there will be available to challenge for England selection.
All very good for England but what about the clubs, looking at this years european competitions, it does not present an immediately attractive picture. Well I honestly believe this year has been an exception what with the lancing of the unholy RFU boil and the demise of the illfated Thomas inspired Johnson regimme that culminated in a worldcup to awful to describe. I digress, the point is this, english rugby will develop very well thank you very much and will benefit as an unintended consequence of the French financial monster.

I can see the argument, and i'm inclined to agree that having more players playing at the top level, wherever that is, should help England. Equally, i actually believe allowing players to play in different rugby cultures is also of huge benefit to the player and England. Haskell improved dramatically at Stade, in my opinion.

But therein lies the issue. The French league IS undoubtedly stronger, therefore those that play in it week in week out are exposed to a higher level of rugby, in my opinion. So although France may have less players playing, they're having to meet much higher standards.

The positive for England i think is about maximising our greatest strength, a large player pool. We're, frankly, terrible at talent identification in this country (Ben Morgan anyone?) and hopefully by having more spaces for players, we can expose more to top level rugby and see who has the talent. I suppose this is your point.

The downside is - that only happens if Prem teams are willing to trust youth over a middle ranking pacific islander or ageing AB. I'm not sure they are. The consequence is in my opinion what we have now, the worst of both worlds - a league of largely average imports keeping out young players without sufficiently improving the overall standard of the league. I would say that we appear to be getting better at trusting youth, but it's early days.

This isn't a criticism of those players by the way, most of them put in a decent shift and are CURRENTLY better than those young players looking to get a game. But i'm not as optimistic as you kingelderfield.

The positive, as i said on a Cardiff Blues thread, is that weak clubs/regions doesn't seem to necessarily mean a poor national team! So maybe you're right after all