Under WLS your options will disappear. If you are not successfully competing against BD and the rest today, you are not going to successfully compete against them under WLS. With their money and research departments they will pick up nearly all of the worthwhile names long before they even enter your field of view and then your chances are gone for good. I have never met a monopoly I liked, including this one. They always create far more problems than they solve.
Duke is right! What makes you think that you can do much better under WLS than now? Once the slot is taken for that domain it is GAME OVER! No matter how much you would be willing to pay, you would lose it to someone that paid around $40 for it. If you are not able to utilize all the drop catchers that are out there today efficiently, I think your chances of getting a WLS slot for a very good name are slim. Sad but true!
Obviously with a lot more drop catchers moving to an auction system, it has become more costly to get good names. However, you have to remember that most of these prices are driven up by us resellers and not the end users, which means that there are people among us here at DNF who actually think they are worth that amont AT LEAST. If you win a name for $10k and are confident that it will fetch at least $15k if you sell it. You have made $5k in profit maybe in a month!
I can see that it maybe is becoming a costly business for some to chase domains on daily basis under the auction systems. But remember that there are so many services out there today that it would be hard to believe that every name has the same bid price all over. Also you might have to reconsider your catching strategy a bit. Instead of going after names on daily bases just for the heck of it and some might not be that good as well, you maybe should save up your money and only go for the names you really want and like and put more purchasing power into those bids among all the drop catchers.
Hey, if you have the money, you can play this game everyday then good for you. If not, maybe it is time to change strategy and save your $$$ for names that are really worth it and then try to place higher bids for those. Maybe at end the month you will found yourself spending about the same amount as before but you got less domains. But at least you got a few that were really worth it.
Just my opinion!