The fix isn't difficult to identify, it's just this mindset that you have to continue moving forward and always jump for that extra dollar. It's dimwitted.
Conferences small enough so everyone plays everyone.
Regionalized.
You can have traditional bowls and/or tie them into a playoff, if you insist.
In nineteen hundred and ninety-one, you had 7 'major' conferences.
There's your 7 conf champions + either 1 at-large OR Mid-major OR ND (let the 37-year drought continue).
8-team playoff yields a dealer's choice of the 4 big, traditional bowls, then the final 4 at one 2-week site OR a rotation of 4 bowls and the biggest 3 traditional bowls rotating as the final 4 sites (cotton/fiesta, sorry) OR homefield games in the first round, OR OR OR...
Not all conferences had 10 teams back then, so there's room to incorporate the schools who have turned into the Jeffersons and moved on up these past 35 years.
It would be a spectacle and glorious. I can't fathom it'd make LESS money. That '95 Northwestern team would earn its way into a NC opportunity. Same with '20 Baylor or '01 Illinois or '15 Stanford and MSU...
Personally, I'd go old bowl system with a +1 as needed. After what BYU and Coastal Carolina pulled off during COVID, shut up with your "they couldn't do it" nonsense.