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This rule has been around as long as I have been coaching. Where is the unfair portion of this rule? You need to give a coach time to get a sub into the game in a situation where the coach is not necessarily ready to substitute. Coaches normally give brief instructions to subs before putting them in, and subs pull off their warm-ups, etc. Somebody somewhere felt that 30 seconds was the appropriate time to allow for all this to occur. You may feel that it is unfair, so be it. But the offending team is losing a player to fouls, and with that many fouls, it's usually someone who gets significant minutes (Read: player is considered valuable enough to spend lots of time on the floor).
So a team gets an unoffical, less-than-30-second timeout every time it loses a valuable component for the rest of the game. The other team gets FTs and the advantage of not playing against whoever they fouled out, but they may have to wait a bit before their FTs. At the end of the day, the team that lost the player is losing more than the team that waits a few seconds for the sub before shooting FTs - I'd much rather be the latter!
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