I thought the whole idea was to have full AHL teams.
Not a huge advantage I can forsee if we exclude certain players. Aka prospects called up this year go into the NHL draft.
The minor disadvantage a few AHL teams might have should be made up for in your NHL draft skills.
I don't think I was clear enough on the function of the AHL team in the OP. It's basically just a place to stash your non-roster players such as prospects or players who don't fit onto your 23 man roster. There's really no reason to be holding on to career minor leaguers and such unless you think they're going to be seeing NHL time, so I highly doubt anyone is actually going to be running with a full AHL team.
That being said, if you guys would still prefer a 23 round draft to fill out the main roster and then just inheriting the rest, we can do it. Maybe we can create some exceptions to prevent the inherited bodies of players from being too lopsided from team to team.
edit: For reference, a lot of the teams in the other league that we're basing this off of have around 35-40 players on their full rosters, and that's including prospects who aren't playing pro hockey yet. If we do a ~30 round draft over the span of 3 or 4 months, I don't think it would be as bad as some of you are thinking... but I'll leave it up to you nonetheless.