Hey, we can remove the hoop from the basketball backboard and have a ref decide if a shot counts as a "basket" or not.
No, because the hoops have always been a part of basketball.
Yes, goal posts have always been a part of football. And they have always been on the end line, ten yards beyond the goal line.
Oh, wait! My bad!! The goal posts were actually on the goal line until 1974. Then, someone figured that if they moved them back to the end line, three things would happen. The first was that receivers would no longer be able to use the goal post to “pick off” a defender. The second was that players would stop running into them, thus avoiding concussions. And third, field goal attempts would be ten yards longer, thus encouraging teams, in some instances, to try for the first down instead of a long field goal, thus adding more excitement to the game.
As for basketball, hoops were not always used. The name of the game that Dr. Naismith invented was called “basketball,” and not “hoopball” for a good reason. At its inception, a peach basket was actually used as the target, and some poor guy sat on a ladder and would retrieve the ball from inside the “basket.” It didn’t take very long, nor was it an amazing act of cognitive insight, for someone to suggest that they cut out the bottom of the basket. This, of course, eventually led to the familiar metal ring and netting that is now used.
There have been rules changes and other evolutionary improvements in every sport, as experience and technology became available. The instant replay is the greatest example of the use of technology in sports, although tennis has made use of the “Cyclops,” which utilizes a beam to determine whether a serve, often in the range of 125 mph, has landed in or out of the required target.
So, if your argument is that changes should never be made because a particular game has “always been played” a certain way, I would suggest that both history and common sense are on the other side of that argument. If you believe that human error by a home plate umpire, while completely avoidable thanks to modern technology, is preferable to the sterility of 100% accuracy, that is certainly your right. I happen to think that it is fairer to the players to get the call correct, and to use whatever means necessary, short of severely impacting the waiting time, to get that call correct. Clearly an automated ball/strike caller would be instantaneous, and 100% accurate. But, we’ve never had them before, therefore, we should never have them.