I mean, unless the talent pool gets a lot stronger in these next 5-10 years, pushing past 32 teams is dicey. 32 is a good number to stop at with this current crop of players.
Nah. The cap is a bigger factor than lack of talent. The cap space forces teams to go with young/inexperienced aka cheap players instead of another veteran. And the teams with cap space and rebuilding, so what do they need that veteran for?
It's easy to look at those free agent veteran role guys who don't get offered contracts in free agency and just disappear as "oh, those guys suck and can't play." But you'll see situations where guys like that DO get an opportunity and suddenly become decent players.
During the Islanders' parasitic SMG lease era when they couldn't get good free agents, they grabbed a dozen guys who were released/waived. Someone like Matt Moulson, who's given the opportunity to play a top six role and suddenly is a 30-goal scorer playing with Tavares. (Then he goes to Buffalo and is exposed as "not that great without Tavares.")
If you want to think realistically about how "opportunity" plays a massive role... 54 weeks ago, the preseason predictions included things like:
A poker pro has a better chance of hitting a straight flush on the river than the Golden Knights have of making the playoffs. The club will undoubtedly struggle to find chemistry as players grow accustomed to each other as well as the inherent newness of the club's place in the league. There's also 25 years of empirical evidence -- dating back to the Ottawa Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning joining the league in 1992 -- showing that expansion teams struggle to compete in their first season.
And four months ago, that team was in the Stanley Cup Finals. We know they got better talent than most expansion teams. But everyone else had guys coming up, taking the place of those they lost. And while each team "got worse" it was a marginal amount.
It's easy to say "holy crap, imagine how good we'd be if WE still had the dude who's crushing it with Vegas right now." But it doesn't work like "we scored 250 goals, he scored 30. With him, we'd score 280." There's one puck for the team to shoot, and 60 minutes of ice time to divide up at each position.
Creating more ice time with new teams allows more players to show what they can do, and you'll find that enough players are capable of doing more than when they're buried.