Agreed, but I was responding to the idea that we shouldn't avoid piecemeal change just because we can't eat the whole loaf in one bite. Reducing ranks without amalgamations is one such piecemeal change. Large-scale amalgamations are a different kind of change.
I suppose that if there are no under-worked people in BORs now, none of them are going to magically go away if units amalgamate without reducing the number of people to be supported. If a Res F BOR is really a COR and is needed for that, then an amalgamated battalion of three companies will still need the staffing of three ORs. We can pretend that there are only a few BORs on paper, but if there are a bunch of detachments consisting of a Reg F Sgt and a couple of Class B Cpl/MCpl for each company, I foresee not much savings there. Alternatively, it would have to be true that Res F OR staff are not as busy as everyone was led to believe, and that they can all stand to have their work loads increased.
Similarly, each part of an amalgamated battalion that has its own facility (armoury) and holding of stores is likely to need a full-time quartermaster, unless that turns out upon serious evaluation to be another example of feather-bedding.
For the Res F members, I suppose that if there are fewer LCol and CWO positions, there will just be fewer people promoted too quickly to those ranks. The people who would have been promoted are still going to stick around, unless they're released as superfluous majors and MWOs. If they're still serving, the savings is only the difference between rank levels, not the elimination of entire soldiers. Maybe we'll save enough to pay for the government's mandates for equipping washrooms - one relatively trivial cost offset by one relatively trivial savings.
Reducing the number of Res F formation HQs shows promise - again, provided most of the full-time people are dramatically underutilized. If one HQ in Edmonton turns out to be intolerably overworked doing everything the units in BC and SK and Thunder Bay need done on their behalf, well, then...
Any of these things might be doable. Amalgamation doesn't require any of them to be doable, but claiming some efficiency as a benefit of amalgamation does require it. The idea of diligence suggests it be done up front. If change is implemented with the assumption the efficiency will be realized and we proceed accordingly - eliminating capabilities we think we won't need - damages will result.