Not sure what you mean by 6 spaces. The 7 riders was how many "failures" Salvarini could afford in his team and still win whereas if Remco is a "failure" at 2500 points then no other rider can afford to also be a failure or else the remaining riders will need to be even more profitable than the rest of Salvaranis team was.
As for the actual structure of the team and the argument that having an expensive pick frees you up to have several extra cheap picks with high potential return. That entirely depends on what cost of riders someone else would have in place of the more expensive one. It could be as little as cheaper riders that you replace to get Remco in plus a 0-coster in the worst case. That ultra cheap alternative rider can hardly compensate for Remco going 2500. And if it was an obvious 0-pointer like Seixas then they would already be in both teams regardless.
Even in my case if I was to make a quick swap to Remco I would have to give up on Seixas, O'Connor, Mas and Torres to afford him and it would leave me with 16 points to buy 3 other riders for. I'm not sure those 16 points would get me very far to compensate for 2500. Say they manage to score 100 points each then that would be 2800 points gained from 4 riders costing 1945. That's still only a 44% gain on 4 riders.
You could of course redo the entire team and cut some other 400+ cost riders in order to get more cash to upgrade those 3 extra spots with to the 100s at least. But that same reasoning applies to any team. You can have a team topped with a couple of 700 cost riders and then you spread the rest evenly at 200 points or so skipping over the 3-400 bracket. You don't need a super expensive pick to get that type of structure.
On top of all that, all the most obvious cheap picks like Zingle and his likes will already be in both teams so the extra cheap riders with high upsides will still be fairly deep cuts to find.
But surely if there are obvious expensive riders, you can also pick them with (or without) Evenepoel on your team. 8 of the 12 Remco teams also have Seixas (and of the remaining four, two squeezed Van Aert into their team and one had Girmay so it's hardly like they couldn't have found the points if they had wanted too). It's hardly one or the other type of choice.
So yeah picking Evenepoel forces you to go deeper on the cheap guys and cheap guys #15-20 are less likely to turn good than cheap guys #1-5. But conversely, not picking him forces you to go deeper on the expensive guys (if we all agree that spending the entire budget is the optimal strategy) and expensive guys #3-5 are less likely to turn good than expensive guys #1-2.
In your instance, it's more O'Connor, Mas, Tiberi and Landa vs Evenepoel and three other guys for a combined 200 points. Sure if Evenepoel stalls out at 2500 points the math probably is going to be in your favor but I'm not sure why that's the expectation for a guy that consistently cranks out 2800+ when healthy.
In 2022, I won the game with Remco as my most expensive pick by over 1600 points on the best non-Remco team. So even if Evenepoel had scored 1525 points (on a price tag on 1325) instead of the 3154 points he actually scored, I still would have won the game. Pretending a rider scoring 2500 points on a 1929 price is somehow an insurmontable obstacle is just not based on reality.
And listen, we can argue Evenepoel vs any combination of riders until we are all blue in the face (O'Connor, Mas, Tiberi and Landa is certainly a valid alternative that can outscore him if things go a certain way). The reality is if Evenepoel doesn't perform, you are still competing with 77 other people to win the game. If he goes nuts, I only have to beat out the other 11 Remco teams to win the game. I'll take
those odds any time.
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