I agree the tribunal probably thought they had bigger fish to fry, but City plainly did challenge the explanation of why the new rules on APTs were introduced. What surprised me was that these apparent concerns the PL and the clubs had about why the previous RPT rules were ineffective was given so little scrutiny. The tribunal seems to have ignored the possibility that the evidence from the redshirts and others was self serving, and they seem to have ignored the possibility that concrete examples of the RPT system being abused appear to have been non existent. As you say, there may have been reasons on both sides not to rely too much on UEFAs failure to land the RPT allegations re Etihad but it has been known for a tribunal to be all the more interested in evidence that both sides appear not to want to dwell on.
Since we are looking at three exceptionally experienced lawyers I can’t see how they could have considered the evidence the PL was relying on without being at least aware of the possibility that City’s competitors were giving evidence against City for reasons of self interest. Nor is it obvious to me why such evidence as the PL relied on was subjected to so little critical analysis. The only conclusion that makes sense to my mind is that they thought it just didn’t matter.
Personally I can only find one piece of objective evidence that might be thought to justify the move from an ex post to an ex ante system, namely the length of time the 115 charges have taken to come to trial, and even that wasn’t subjected to any sort of analysis, eg that the PL plainly did nothing while the UEFA case was ongoing.
However in the final analysis I don’t think they were interested in second guessing why the PL chose to move to a different system. They were plainly satisfied that it wasn’t simply a change made for capricious or bad faith reasons - I just don’t think they needed that much persuading on that.