Protected Rivals causing home/away rotation issues across all teams in Dynasty

It's not the protected rivalries that's screwing it up. 

It's the "no divisions" model that conferences are moving towards that gives the scheduler too much leeway without proper guardrails. I fully recognize that I have limited coding knowledge, and things I might think of as easy are probably deceptively difficult, but a realistic home-away split for conference games just does not seem like moving mountains to me. It is 4-5, or 5-4 for a 9 game conference model, and 4-4 for and 8 game conference model. These do not seem like the most impossible checks to add on to generating a schedule.  

The other thing I don't get is how the game will have conference schedules spit out 3 or more home or away conference games in a row. NO CONFERENCE OFFICE WOULD DO THAT. 

I fully agree that conference schedules need fixing, but protected rivalries is not the issue. EA cannot fix a problem if you cannot identify the real root of the issue. 

Thank you for your response. As I said in a Reddit, I've run multiple tests where I took 2 of the exact same teams in different saves, and after season 1, I would turn on the protected rival setting for one of the saves and leave it off for the other. The one with the protected setting just pretty much **bleep** up the conference scheduling, and it's continuous for nearly every season I sim towards, while the other is pretty fine, but in addition, you don't get to play some  traditional rivals that you should be playing every year (not talking about rivalry week) but I just hope if I'm wrong the issue still gets resolved either way.

So the biggest thing you're not considering (or at least have not mentioned) is the default schedule vs after edits. If you don't touch the conferences at all, the default schedule is railroaded to match the known games we have (I think through 2030). Eventually, though, you run out of known games and you get a random drawing of conference opponents with no consideration for rivalries. Basically, you have to control for all the variables before blaming one particular feature. 

This railroading of the default schedule is what is giving the appearance of protected rivalries creating bad conference schedules. Eventually you will end up with the same bad schedules, protected rivalries or not. That's what came up when I tested this out. It is the fact that EA does not add the proper guardrails to its conference schedule generator, and the no-divisions model of large conferences takes out the few guardrails that do exist. 

Well what I said before Protected Rivals or not felt like this issue is something that should of been fixed a long time ago and is pretty glaring to some people.

 I would also say It might not be the sole reason but it does create situations where scheduling becomes a issue especially when I factored it with the setting off.