"I think the Australian public would love to see the best Australian team on the park for every game. It's difficult to do that with the schedule and how much we play."
Cricket Australia high-performance manager Pat Howard has previously said Australia should embrace the prospect of two teams being in action almost simultaneously.
"We've done better and performed better when players have really lavished the opportunity, versus it being tacked on at the end of a long season," he said in October.
"So there is a way to have a think about this differently to give us a better chance of winning."
With players now competing regularly in three formats of the game, managing their workloads has become increasingly tricky.
Australia chose to rest Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc for their one-day international tour of South Africa in October and ended up losing the series 5-0.
"Had they been there, things could have been slightly different," Smith said.
"We look now and see how well they're bowling, and (considering) how much cricket they've had to play over the summer, it was probably the right decision to have rested them and made sure they were fit for the summer."
Smith says he isn't fussed who leads the T20 team in his absence, so long as they get the best out of the players at their disposal.
He has turned his attention to the 2018 World T20 after Australia were eliminated in the group stages by India in this year's tournament.
"In T20 cricket, we play games on and off, here and there," he said.
"For me, the most important thing is that we win major tournaments in that format of the game, and that's the World Cup."
- AAP
