Acadamy like Venue in Swindon?

I have recently found out that an influential person in the Swindon music scene is planning to create a 2000 capacity venue right in the centre of town. It looks like the old bingo hall at Regents Circus could be converted to be such a venue.My views on this are complex, I have never been one of those shouting out for an Academy in Swindon in fact I think it could be damaging to the Music Scene. We have problems filling up Swindons smaller venues with punters let alone a 2k capacity venue! OK so the smaller venues generally have local originals bands and a venue of such size would have national (and international) acts on tours etc which brings me back to how would this help the local grass roots music scene? I think people are under the perception that the local acts will be involved somehow, this is a fallacy. For a large venue to hit capacity and make it commercially viable it must book acts that are of a size to pull in custom from other towns other than Swindon, this means big promoters in it for the money. Do you really think they would be bothering to contact local acts to support? No is the short and simple answer, most of the national acts will already have preferred support acts also a lot will be on a national tour where the acts usually travel with the circus that goes along with a large managed tour. Local acts wont get a sniff, neither will local promoters. "Oh but people will come from outside Swindon to check out the scene", again I believe this to be untrue. If you go to Bristol to see a band at the Bierkeller that are on tour, do you bother to check out any of the smaller local gigs? If you do hats off to yourself because I myself would be too concerned in seeing the band I travelled and paid good money to see.My personal feeling is that the large venue/Academy viewpoint is what the Swindon music scene sees as a 'Magic Bullet', i.e. a way of creating a large vibrant active music scene in one big shot without a huge amount of effort, I also see this effect happening with bands like 'The Alfonz', a good little band but nowhere near good enough to receive major radio airplay but Swindonites pin their hopes on them as the guiding lights to a better world. Its time to wake up and realise the key to a good Swindon music scene is the roots up, support of the local small venues and the up and coming bands that need nurturing. I believe if an act from Swindon 'Breaks thought' it will come from nowhere. They would of hardly touched the local music scene and gone on tour of the UK and been picked up by a small label or good management and the current Swindon music scene would be unaware of them until they start appearing on Jools Holland or the insides of NME.Then there would be a feeding frenzy of people in Swindon claiming to be their best mates and seen their first gig in the Vic or other such claims to fame, and everyone else will hate them and try to knock them down a peg.
A large venue would be nice as the point of view of seeing larger acts coming to Swindon and would be good for the gig going public in the area as it would save them going to places like Oxford, London, Bristol etc to see these bigger bands and for that fact I welcome it, however as a solution to all of Swindons musical problems I wouldn't hold my breath...