A free-market system is the fairest way to allocate players. All the other owners think Favre is overpaid. Contrast that to a draft, where a dozen owners may want Favre, but only one chump is lucky enough to have his franchise's name drawn out of a hat. Rating the players is the easy part of auction league preparation. Assigning dollar values and deciding on a strategy is more difficult.
Auctions require more cunning and preparation than a straight draft.
Owners holding the first overall pick in drafts spend the entire summer debating between Favre and Davis. Those guys will be long gone before the end of the second round. Not surprisingly, the popularity of auctions is soaring. We receive plenty of requests for Cheat Sheets that include dollar values. But even that saturation bombing of player lists won't mesh exactly with more than a few fantasy leagues.