I mocked Jonathan Vaughters' dressing up self-serving propositions as 'progress', locking off the top level to guarantee his team a position at the top table, but at least his reasoning was sound; as one of the smaller budget top tier teams (who at the time he presented that idea had been overachieving relative to that budget) and with a number of moneyed new teams appearing at the top level in short order (Radioshack, Leopard, BMC) his team's position was vulnerable so he proposed something that would safeguard it.
I also mocked Rick Delaney's tantrum that his team didn't get treated like a bigger deal than it deserved to be, and after he got more invites than most first year ProTeams do thanks to a paucity of alternatives, he couldn't deal with having to take a smaller slice of the pie when there were more teams sharing those invites around, and so threw his toys out the pram, took his ball home and did whatever other hackneyed metaphor for childish sulking you want to add, going from "we might be signing Richie Porte" to "we are folding not at the end of the season but RIGHT NOW" in a matter of days.
Sylvain Adams has a bit of both really. He is proposing a change of the rules to avoid relegation because his team hasn't been good enough to avoid it, and presumably because his team is less tied to an identity that can survive beyond the WT, in the same way as how HTC couldn't find a sponsor to take on the team but teams like Skil-Shimano, NetApp, Caisse d'Epargne and Rabobank, which had a certain identity based on location or type of races, could. Lotto have a much better chance of doing a 'Europcar' or a 'Cofidis' (or a 2010 Vacansoleil for that matter), settling in as a top ProTeam and working back to the top table by focusing on the calendar available to them domestically and regionally via sprinters, classics men and stagehunters, than Israel do, because their identity is far more scattershot; they also probably have a few high-cost millstone contracts for older riders who aren't getting any better and whose name value was as big a factor in their signing as their expected results. They're probably therefore much more dependent on the invites to big races than Lotto are; although looking at the various options at the ProTeam level they ought not to have too much trouble securing invites if they are able to keep the majority of their roster intact - but I'm sure that presenting his case for wildcards to various organisers was not what Sylvain expected to be doing based on the roster he assembled at the time he assembled it.
I wonder how much Dylan Teuns' contract cost to break.