Okay, I figured it out. In the first post I mentioned that due to keeping shortlists on automatic updates, my scouting budget was depleted. I fixed this later by pumping it back up (by leveraging over some of the Transfer budget). The problem was, that this automatically put the Scouting range (which can be found under Scouting -> Players -> Top right of the screen) to No Scouting. Because this was on No Scouting, my Managing Director decided, well what's the point of having Scouts if we allegedly don't scout. In the post-season I put this Scouting range back to Central Europe, and low and behold my Scouting numbers are automatically back up. I'm genuinely not sure if it's a bug or a feature, but at least there's a solution!