Horse 2706 - Why Does There Still Need To Be Two Rugbys?

Last week on Twitter, I asked the question of why there still needed to be two kinds of rugby football and as expected I copped loads of lovely abuse which ranged from everything from accusing me of not understanding the difference (I could write a long essay detailing the differences those people if they like), from not understanding why there is a difference, to just direct abuse which included all kinds of lovely Saxon words and one soul with a surname of lots of numbers wishing that I get COVID-19 and die.
To appease some those people, I will give a short history lesson because it is instructive to the current problem.

The great split into the Rugby League and the Rugby Union happened at a meeting in the George Hotel in Huddersfield, after clubs from the south of England, rejected the northern rugby clubs’ calls for payments to players to be legalised, after the players from the north argued that they afford to play without being paid for missing time at work. The Rugby Union was basically horrified at how working-class 'their' game had become; especially when the clubs in the decidedly industrial and dirty Lancashire and Yorkshire, began to have more power than the old public school network of those people from Harrow and Eton.
That class divide is still in evidence more than 135 years later, with Rugby League being mainly played in the north of England and in western Sydney and southern Queensland; and Rubgy Union being mainly played in the south of England eastern Sydney.
The rest of the world doesn't really care. New Zealand is a Rugby Union nation with a token Rugby League team, South Africa, Argentina, Ireland, France, Italy, Japan, Scotland etc, all play Rubgy Union; and the only other nation that is really known for playing Rubgy League is Papua New Guinea.
To tell the truth, Rugby League is a poor cousin in the north of England anyway, as the cities of Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford etc. have football teams with budgets which extend into billion pound territory.

At anything beyond NSW club level with the sole exception of State of Origin matches, there really isn't that much call for Rugby League in the world. New Zealand could probably ditch Rugby League tomorrow with zero consequence and to be fair if England could get over its idiotic class divide, then it could probably also ditch Rugby League tomorrow with some reorganisation.
Australia is the outlier with the big sticklers being the NSWRL, QRL, NSWRU and the QRU. If those four could be reconciled somehow, then there need not be two kinds of rugby at all.

What this COVID-19 crisis should have brought into sharp focus is that what the two codes of Rugby are really fighting over is who can be the biggest pipsqueak. With the exceptions of the United States, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and a bunch of Pacific island nations, football eclipses the rugbys.
I do not think that it makes economic sense to split resources between the two codes, just because of class arguments. Really, that's the only reason why there ever was two kinds of rugby and why two kinds of rugby remain.

In all honesty, you could probably enmesh the two kinds of rugby in just about every province and at every level. In most nations that just means a single national competition, and for provincial and state competitions and at national level that also means collapsing the two into one. For example, nobody really cares about the Kangaroos and Super Rugby basically exists to appease the underlying problem that Rugby Union isn't commercially viable otherwise (which again stems from the competition between two codes for the same dollarpounds).

Unifying the two games would also invariably require unifying the rules again and again to be honest, the rules which exist are because of firstly the split, secondly the domination of St George in the 1950s and 1960s, and the demands of television.
I think that the clearing out of the rucks and the limited tackle count has rendered Rugby League as a really dumb game. It isn't as tactically diverse as Rugby Union and the weird thing is that the game isn't as good as it was before the limited tackle count.
ABC2 used to run a program called Late Night League Legends, which was the station filling up time with old Rugby League matches and it became really obvious to me that the reason why St George was so good was because they invented tactics to make the opposition carry and then spill the ball rather than holding onto it themselves. That resulted in matches with the same kind of intensity as a State of Origin match, all the time.
Of course Rugby Union suffers from the messiness of having rucks and mauls that don't clear and collapse but that at least provides for another way of tactically playing the game.

Rugby Union also has a better reward system than Rugby League; with more points on offer for kicking goals, as well as better rewards for kicking the ball in normal play.
In a move which is counter intuitive, Rugby League has no real incentive for maintaining possession. The limited tackle count of six, which was extended from four when it was first brought in, means that a team has to give up possession for no reason other than the operation of the rules. That's stupid.
The limited tackle count which was brought in to stop the domination of St George, was taken directly from the NFL in the United States. The accompanying set of rules that go with having a limited down count in American Football means that a team retains possession provided that they are able to make 10 yards down the field. Possession is rewarded provided that you can prove that you deserve it. No such thing exists in Rugby League but in Rugby Union with no tackle count, you can maintain possession for as long as you can maintain possession.
The messiness and sluggishness of one kind of rugby is countered by the stupidity and disincentive system of the other. I am sure that some kind of sensible compromise can be worked out here because I do not think that the idiocies of one game outweigh the idiocies of the other.

Unifying the two kinds of rugby is both a class issue and a rule set issue. The second as with any sport can be solved by a governing body simply laying down the rules. The class issue should be resolved by the two boards getting over themselves. I will naturally declare my biases here and say that I would be equally happy if there were no kinds of rugby at all and that the rest of the world has quite rightly decided that football is the better game however, since the rugbys exist then their continued survival would be better achieved through restoring an economy of scale which should never have been split in the first place and which has served neither of them. Part of the the reason why the rugbys are both marginal sports in most markets is because they are competing against each other needlessly. It needs to stop.