w.r.t playing teams with extra rest, there's a million things that go into making the schedule. It'd be next to impossible to sit there and try to do it in a way that hurts one specific team. For instance, teams can only play a certain number of consecutive road games, they have to get a bye after a London game, two teams share a stadium, and multiple teams share parking lots with MLB teams that are still playing, (and in Oakland's case they share the stadium). Lots of cities have marathons in October and the NFL team can't be at home that day if the race course goes close to the stadium (Chicago comes to mind). The NFL struggles enough trying to work through all of this to even start considering how to mess with the Redskins.
Beyond that we tend to completely ignore any evidence to the contrary. For instance the 2015 schedule has an unusually easy start and a very difficult finish to it. If that schedule was completely reversed, I'm sure some people on this board would complain that the league wants to bury the Redskins early and not even give the team a shot.