Morgan - my take on the rebuild is it is a myth used to cover up ineptitude and lack of strategic thinking by key personnel.
If it was a genuine requirement of football, and part of club planning, then why wouldn't clubs (and Freo) talk about the "upcoming rebuild" when they were doing well.
The good clubs renew their lists continually, or have brief periods of less success, rarely involving multiple seasons and the bottom 4 or 6. They don't talk about rebuilds. The crap clubs are continually rebuilding, and never getting it right, but never shut up about rebuilding.
We went from 1st to virtually last in 1 off season, and that disaster generated our rebuild rhetoric. That disaster was overseen by Lyon. A lot of coaches would have been (rightly) sacked for that. How the football department couldn't have seen that crash coming (when many of us on here did) confounds me. But if they did, they deliberately ignored it for at least 2 years, and gambled on a premiership with an ageing Pav and Elvis. The gamble failed, and now we are putting up with sustained poor performance as a result of their continued reliance on ageing KP superstars, and poor draft choices as a result.
As far as your argument about gradual improvement, I have said it before and I'll say it again - we have a soft draw this year. The worse you perform, the softer your draw is the next year, and the draw is critical in making up the 8. So we had a tough draw the year after our minor premiership. Giants, WC, Bullies twice. Our draw this year is butter soft, and critically, we have played the poor teams at home, increasing our chances of a win. We also have Nat Fyfe in great form, and in 2016 he was out with injury. Imagine if we’d reversed the home and away component of the fixtures to date, and had no Nat Fyfe playing - we could easily be sitting with 1-2 wins on the board.
So win/loss alone is a flawed way to measure progress. You need - as most here are - look at the developing patterns of play, coaching tactics, and structures. They are largely stagnant. Our % remains terrible, 5pts above Brisbane with 1 win on the board. The only reason we are winning more games than the 2016 disaster is due to the relative strength of the sides we have played, where we have played them, and the presence of Nat Fyfe in blistering form.
Coaching & team improvement? Negligible.
And that’s why there is negativity.