According to your descriptions, I believe your team is higher in quality than other teams, but it is not necessarily "better than anybody" in your league. Other than quality, attending matches, and morale, there are other aspects like tactics and player form are required to be managed. Certainly a higher quality team should have better chance to win, but this is not guaranteed.
As league drawing is highly influenced by team average player qualities now, buying tokens in order to improve team quality is no longer a simple effective way to improve team performance. If a team is higher in quality, your league opponents are higher in quality too. So tokens can help to build a beautiful 7/8/9/10 star teams with multiple role players but the team likely meets other beautiful teams in same league. If a team buy tokens to improve quality, they likely need to buy tokens in every season to maintain same competitiveness (assuming no manipulation of team quality to receive better draws)
Low quality teams like 2 or 3 star average quality team may compete with 2 or 3 star average quality teams in league. If they can manage to maintain this quality level in every season, they may have long term success even if they are considered low in average quality.
I don't buy tokens. I only use auction market to buy players. I always think managing team quality, not simple improving quality, is key to ensure long term success. In the past, my teams can naturally maintain 5 star throughout every season without buying tokens. Since new version implemented, teams got 6% instead of 5% condition in every 3 hours. The increase in condition recovery accelerate player improvement. This also upset my balance that my relative team quality in terms of stars increased in every season. When most of my players start a season with quality close to 6 star, I cannot improve my team quality with my resources available. I cannot repeat my old cycle to improve my teams. So, for my case, my teams are more difficult to compete now because some of opponents still have way to improve.
1. In my experience, loses may upset team form which is not easy to recover. So teams will likely suffer worse results in following matches.
2. As I understand, supporting managers may receive gifts from teams they supported. But they are restricted to receive maximum 1 gift of same type per day.
5. I like this suggestion. This is a hot one which have been proposed by many managers before. At present, time zone of managers is considered to arrange fixture schedule. Instead of using time zones, I have proposed T11 to set several time windows and allow managers to select themselves.