Very well explained, I’ve heard about the change to the shortlist format this year from another community online and suspected this is the reason as well.
Just like you said, the list of players loaded have changed with the updates for me, and I always load the same nations. I hope this gets fixed pretty soon because what I like to do is keep a big list of players (mostly youngsters) that I keep an eye on every save so that I get news updates about them, such as bids on them from another team, etc. This is a very important point for me playing this game, and I had to go through the whole game putting together the list with the same players 3 times already! And I like to start new saves pretty often rather than play a save for 10+ seasons :P
However, I agree with you that this can be unfair to the dev team who are already looking into this issue, and I believe them to come up with a solution some time soon so I’m just waiting on that before I start another save!