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So let's do the 12-team playoff and let in the Sun Belt champs each season to play Alabama or Ohio State or whoever.  Advance 10 years.  The Sun Belt champs are 0-10 with an average margin of 45-13. 
The Sun Belt's champs' reward for a great season is to get curb-stomped, having had no chance to win before the game began.  They're supposed to look forward to that?!?  THAT'S a reward? 

It's masochistic.  But it's fair!

Also not accurate. I assume under a 12 team format you would have byes for the top 4. Coastal Carolina was the de facto Sun Belt champ. They probably would gave been seeded 8th, maybe playing San Jose St. In the first round. No chance against San Jose St.?

Well, there are reasons we don't have an 8 team playoff, despite its being very popular and would make more money.

Those must be pretty good reasons.

They may be dumb and still good, in the sense they are effective and influential among the PTBs.

Those reasons have to be traversed to effect change.

Also not accurate. I assume under a 12 team format you would have byes for the top 4. Coastal Carolina was the de facto Sun Belt champ. They probably would gave been seeded 8th, maybe playing San Jose St. In the first round. No chance against San Jose St.?

There are zero formats in which a SJST would play Coastal in a playoff.

Yup.

Which is why they shoulda left it alone from about 1983 on.

At times I’ve tried to think through this counter factual. My assumption is this would lead to a situation more annoying than the one we have now for a key reason.

CFB fans are deeply unable to unplug from the national discourse. We no ranking have no meaning, but we allow them to create strong emotions. The posters on here are much smarter than average, but still we can say we don’t care about ESPN opinions (that’s good) and still worry the playoff is sucking up all the oxygen, where the oxygen is the very act of giving attention at all. And we’re in an era where you can deep dive into whatever team/seasons you care for and hardly note the national dialogue at all. But we just don’t.

In 1983, part of the reason the system could stand was because there was less info and many fewer voices. Maybe your local columnist or the SI writer broke down this weird system, but we weren’t all interconnected, we couldn’t all find everything in 10 seconds. If we had the old system, the national discussion from which we can’t unplug would just be trained on the system. Back then we were completely ok with sports writer rankings and coaches who maybe do their own ballots running the whole show. But that being it most certainly would be a disaster in our modern media environment.

Basically, we know too much, and a system built on the options of those two groups just wouldn’t stand up without a bonkers discourse we can’t help but plug into.

I want to live in a world where a team like Navy could win their conference, and then triple option their way through a few of the big boys in the playoffs. Take out Notre Dame in round one, then Oklahoma in round two, then give Bama a scare for a few quarters in the NCG. Tough to top that.

By good reasons, I mean effective reasons, not reasons any of us might agree with.  The reasons have been very effective at preventing any 8 team playoff despite of the obvious advantages and popularity of the concept with many.

So, call them effective reasons.