The NFL product is better than the college football product by a pretty wide margin right now. And it has little to do with how many teams make the playoffs, or who gets invited to the playoffs. The best teams are the best teams.
The Bengals and the Rams get to draft from the same pool of players, every team operates under the same salary cap, and players under contract are bound to their teams until the team decides to get rid of them or their contract runs out. That's the difference. College football has obviously never operated that way, but the recent changes only make what was already bad much worse.
You're barking up the wrong tree IMO. Focusing on who isn't "invited" and that kind of ESPN and CFP committee stuff is not seeing the forest through the trees.