As much as I hate the cheating Sharts and Manly, it seems like a piss poor idea to axe any team that's been around for the best part of a century in order to hopefully get an intercity rivalry going.
Basically let's piss off up to 30,000-40,0000 fans by killing off their club in hopes of diluting the fan base in Brisbane to create rivalry there. We can already see that you can't just implant a team somewhere and expect the fans to flock to them with the Titans experiment as well as the rams etc.
If they wanted to set up a second tier competition and have the wooden spooner from the NRL demote with the second tier premiership winner promoting it might go down better. But they'd have to invest heavily in this as opposed to thinking that ousting a team would be a moneymaker.