5. Bring us wild cards! For an example, if there's 30 teams in ECL, 15 per group, lets have wild card spots. Six best teams go straight to the playoffs, 7th-10th teams battle for remaining two playoff-spots. Teams that dont make playoffs (11-15th placed teams in both groups), would battle in elimination round for their next seasons ECL ticket. Five losers from these five pairs get eliminated.
This is a really good idea from @vSilenttio, but i would make the 1st division ( "ECL") 2 groups with 16 teams in each.
I also suggest that two teams from each group gets relegated and 4 teams from the 2nd division would be promoted to ECL.
And because we just have to start from somewhere maybe the teams reaching the playoffs now have a spot in the ECL 4.
Wildcard spots and the fight for the ECL group spots could keep up the motivation for all the teams.