the rewards of a good draft

i think the reward of picking a good player late in the draft is that your fantasy baseball team will be helped greatly. this is enough of an incentive to do the research and work hard in the later rounds.
i would prefer the draft to be a thing of the past once the season starts, and i think one of the most fun things about our league is the active waiver wire. under the keeper-tied-to-round-drafted system, what would happen if i wanted to keep ryan howard this year? i'm not trying to make an argument against this system, i'm just trying to figure out where i stand based on issues like this one.
right now i'm leaning toward everyone keeping the same number of players and basically starting the draft at round three or four or two or whatever. if someone like andy wants to keep younger guys like liriano that's his perogative. i don't think his team will necessarily be worse off than a team that keeps guys like billy wagner. if you look through last year's first three rounds you'll find what ended up being many medicore players. fantasy performances are not as consistent from year to year as on might think. my first pick last year was carlos beltran who started over 100 games for me last year, completely shit the bed, and i still somehow came in 1st. maybe we could look at last year's draft spreadsheet to see who the consensus top 30 was.

p.s., andy, your three hypothetical keeper picks (liriano, duke, bay) were all on the final roster of the champion chocolate gazongas. those might have to be my first three picks next year.