Oh, no, I didn't think that and I hope I didn't come off as stand-offish either - just passionate about this particular discussion.
And I of course see where you're coming from too. My question is mostly - how are you going to define which countries do a pre-qualifying tournament? If you do it through FIFA ranking points, I can point out re: Iceland's infrastructure that only 9 years ago, when the generation that eventually reached Euro/WC was starting their national careers, we were lower on the ranking than the Faroe Islands, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are now. We absolutely were not competitive until relatively recently. If you do it through country size, what is the cutoff?
I think the big point here is that the relevant nations themselves have not moved for a pre-qualifying tournament within UEFA or FIFA parameters AFAIK. I guess you could argue the UEFA Nations D-League already provides an even-footed competition in the manner that you are thinking about, if I understand your position correctly. If they really wanted to get that format intertwined into the Euro/WC qualifiers beyond what the NL provides, I imagine they'd move for it - and if they did, I doubt other nations' FAs would stand against it. Or if they thought the qualifiers were harming the sport in their country, they could always just send their teams to the Nations League and not register them for the qualifiers themselves - the latter of which we did e.g. in the 60's and early 70's.
But as it stands, I just think this is how they want to do it.
I know it's certainly what we wanted even when we won 17 qualifying matches out of 104 the we did decide to participate in during the 20th century.
Re: your last point. I completely agree - I just don't want to go the handball route in football. I really hope they don't get those plans through.