It's very hard to take a team over to Aus financially and arranging suitable fixtures. I personally think Saints and Hudds were token gesture efforts. Player loans / placements / exchanges seems the best option.
Sport is not fool proof and the better team can lose every so often but overall the better team / best teams wins the vast majority of the matches they play. We need to get to a situation where British RL is that better team / best team.
The greatest difficulty we have is the decision makers. Self interest and short term thinking by those making the decisions kills long term progress. Tough decisions are often the right decisions but in British RL, taking the easy decision has prevailed for so very long.