What if: Disney XD hadn't taken over television rights?

I thought at that time that, especially considering the 20th Anniversary of the Pokémon franchise, they would have been better off selling the anime to a syndication distributor, who would then re-sell the broadcast rights to the show to local broadcast stations (similarly to Dr. Phil and Jeopardy!, as well as the first Indigo League season when 4Kids was doing the dubbing).
A theoretical syndication arrangement would have episodes from the first 19 seasons repeated on Monday-Friday (stripped similarly to "off-network syndication" reruns of many popular sitcoms), and new Sun & Moon episodes on Saturday (or Sunday) (which could have been dealt separately, similar to the 1991-2001 first run syndication of Baywatch).

More recently, I thought that, had Sinclair Broadcast Group started their "KidsClick" daily morning cartoon block a year earlier (it had started broadcasting on This TV and Sinclair-operated Fox, The CW, and myNetworkTV stations on July 1st of this year), they probably could have put in a bid for the Pokémon anime.

Another possible solution would have been for a "digital subchannel" network, including Antenna TV, MeTV, and the aforementioned This TV, to pick up the rights to at least the first 19 seasons of Pokémon. That kind of move, had that been accomplished by a "digi-net" service (or by a first-run syndicator or even KidsClick), would very likely gain the digi-net significant publicity, almost on the same level Antenna TV received in late 2015 when they picked up the rights to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for nightly repeats of surviving episodes from 1972 until Carson's retirement in 1992 (to the point where the subchannel service gained some new affiliates). Though, to be fair, a subchannel would likely be the least favorable option, as most subchannel services broadcast in 480i standard definition (though that might begin to change in the next several years as ATSC 3.0 begins rolling out).

All in all, though, I can't really believe that the Pokémon anime would be so expensive as to limit its broadcast rights availability to cable channels. After all, the Big Four American English-language broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox) themselves spend billions of dollars for several-years-long live sports contracts (especially the NFL and NCAA). Could my previous speculation of a bidding war won by Disney XD for the Pokémon anime really have been the cause of all of this? (Speaking of such, that kind of scenario reminded me of how Fox greatly outbid CBS for the NFC package in 1993 (Fox bid $1.6 billion, while then-NFC incumbent CBS offered less than $300 million), which indirectly triggered a large swath of television network affiliation changes for a period starting in December 1994.)