Rugby

The Pacific Island teams play in a Pacific tournament, I think with Japan, USA and maybe Canada? The fundamental reason they're not being brought into the other tournaments is because they bring nothing financial to the table. No significant domestic TV audience, the logistics of travelling there are onerous and there are no big stadiums to get gate receipts from. Japan will be brought into the Rugby Championship for exactly the opposite reasons. the real concern re the Pacific Island teams is no longer ANZ, but the fact that France have 3 'academies' across the islands, so the most promising young players get contracts with French academies and by the time they mature they're French qualified. There was some ridiculous stat recently that across the French league there were more Fijian wingers than French ones. Maybe no French wingers, but that sounds too extreme and I can't be arsed to check...

The issue with bringing other teams into the established tournaments (the same argument runs for promotion/relegation into the 6 nations, without which how do Georgia/Spain etc develop) is that the existing nations are the shareholders and it would be turkeys voting for christmas for Italy/Scotland to vote to open up relegation. This was the premise of the recently tabled 'Nations League' which would have guaranteed the non-tier-1 teams more games and introduced promotion/relegation. Scotland vetoed it. Understandable, from their perspective, but so short-sighted for the future of the game!

One rule change that would have a MASSIVE impact would be re national qualification, such that if a tier 2 qualified player was capped by NZ/France/England etc, but then not likely to be picked again, they could revert to their country of birth/qualification and play for them. It would seriously enhance the playing resources of the smaller teams and mean that all of the academies and 'poaching' wasn't necessary so negative as a load more players would have access to professional training but still could perform for their home nation if it didn't work out with a tier 1 team.

Also, re the inaccessability and non-commerciality of the pacific island teams (and allowing for the fact that almost all of their players are based outside their home nations anyway) you could set them up in Spain/Italy/France/UK and have them play a local tournament in that region - they would almost certainly pick up a significant ex-pat and local fanbase and it would make everything so much easier logistically and commercially...