It's probably not a matter of if, but when and also how a draft should be executed. The original brand extension didn't a draft until two years later in 2004. That draft promised to shake the foundation of WWE.
That draft did shake up the foundation of WWE, it moved around the jobbers and the undercard and Edge(who was still years away from the main event). If they're going to have a draft, they need to have reason for it. That 2004 draft was pretty unnecessary as it moved around no one at the top.
Draft's are bigger drawing nights. They're guaranteed to garner extra viewers on a pretty big scale. They'll be tempted to do that. The 2005 WWE draft was the first one to have a significant impact. It moved main eventers and switched the two World Champions.
Annual drafts force creative to have drafts no matter what they really want to do. A 2017 draft should only be necessary if one roster is lop sided when due to injuries or if feuds are stale.
A trade window is an interesting, but how do you keep things not lopsided. Let's say one show needs a top guy but the other only needs a tag team. Is Seth Rollins for American Alpha a good trade then?
Whereas in a draft scenario, if Rollins is the only top guy drafted to Smackdown and Alpha are the only tag team drafted you don't have to risk popping the bubble that is the willful suspension of disbelief.
A trade scenario might be a little too much for WWE creative to handle. They might not be able to book a believable trade angle than a draft. You don't need to be creative to book a draft, you just need to be have it be logical or random.
WWE should have booked the 2016 draft as random, because their draft made zero sense. Why would AJ Styles, Finn Balor or Roman Reigns be picked when Brock Lesnar and John Cena were still available?
They chose to use the draft as a way to highlight the new guys. Good for them, but they did it in a way that made little sense.
Ditto for the NXT drafts. Obviously NXT couldn't afford to lose Nakamura, Asuka or Bayely, but the fact that the GMs and Commissioners "chose" the people they chose. Shane and Bryan chose Mojo Rawley when literally every NXT champion was allegedly on the table.
There should have been some randomness to the selections. Each brand could have gotten X amount of NXT pics that were "randomized." Finn made sense, but not higher than 15 WWE champion, star of many films and television and oversized Boy Scout in jorts John Cena is sitting there scratching his "you can't see me."
You have to be deliberate and logical, something wrestling struggles with, so you just have to use the tools. A random draft works better than anything that has to claim to have an kind of deliberate logic behind it. The 2016 draft could have still highlighted the new guys first. All you had to do was say they got one pick, then a few random ones.
2017 draft will happen, it should be "random" and it should avoid easy logic holes such as trying to justify trades.
