Two consecutive weeks of podcast?! Awesome! Hopefully I can get back into the habit of listening to you while I do inventory at work.
To the point of team traits on new figures vs. old ones, you could easily do it in the way that WW did. The Amazons there give tokens to any Amazon. It would bloat the cost of Age of Apocalypse figures a bit, but it can go back to the other point: make it an optional cost.
As for carrying over special "team traits," X-Statix has come back. The JSA have carried over. I think you could make the argument that this is basically how it's working going forward.
(I'm obviously writing this as I listen here.)
You guys put down TMT and SFoSM as great sets, I feel like maybe sticking to the theme could've also been a downfall. I'm not a fan of Thor nor Spider-Man, so I didn't buy these sets. Quality of the set means nothing to me if I'm not interested in the themes. I dispute that extra elements makes a set great, though. I really wanted to get the special weapons of TMT, but I couldn't justify the expense because I'm not interested in Thor. Now I feel like a potential scumlord because all the secondary markets are selling the weapons without their associated figures. Yeah, I'd buy the figure for the weapon, but the weapons should always be packaged with their people. That's just disgraceful. Now with Xavier's School, I reluctantly had to distance myself from that set because I'm an X-Men '92 baby, and the only things I wanted from this set were the SRs & up. This means I'm not getting the ID cards, and I have to make my peace with that. Then again, I'm also probably a bit influenced in that any element that pulls the game away from the figures themselves makes me cringe a bit, so I'm biased in my opinion. To me, extra elements are fine in prepacks like FF's (which should all be starters in my eyes, but that's a whole other rant).
This was a high-quality program this time around! I miss the keyword spotlight not showing up, but you put in so much more good content I can forgive it. Awesome show, great job! I'll put forth a quick question for you: what's your favorite generic keyword to theme?

On the subject of the low-cost vs. high-cost dial designs, I like to see a nice mix within teams. I have no real interest in playing just the sub-50-point Simpler Time guys together in one game, but I love playing 35-point Alan Scott and 45-point Ma Hunkel together with 110-point Stargirl and 65-point Wildcat (I know he's not exactly high-cost but he sure looks it compared to the others).

So I'm totally ready for an expensive, robust JSA Dr. Fate dial but I also badly want a run of 30-to-55-point Legionnaires. Every time I go to build a LoSH team now, I'm frustrated by the fact that it seems to cost me 85+ points to add just one attacker.