Firstly Marner's play in his own zone is better than Jake's. I watched him for years with the Knights and he was consistently one of the best players on the Knights defensively. Having watched a few games of him in the NHL, that hasn't changed. He is easily one of the better forwards for Toronto defensively. At the moment Jake isn't exceptional defensively, his underlying stats looked good last year because he was sheltered as a rookie. But that's fine, most players develop their defensive games as they grow older.
This is a forum is it not? Then you should expect to see some dissension. If we all agreed on everything there would be no point coming here at all. If you can't deal with one person's opinion there are other remedies you can take, like blocking that person's posts. Flaming them so that they will stop though is against board rules and accomplishes nothing.
Ehlers and Nylander are far better players than Jake is currently. It is unlikely that changes in the future. Is there a chance? Sure. Would they be doing better here than Jake is? I would bet my house on it. This organization has screwed with the development of Virtanen, that doesn't mean the same would have occurred with either Nylander or Ehlers. Both of them were far more ready to play in the NHL last year than Virtanen was.
Actually it seems like the opposite to me, whenever anyone decides to compare Jake with one his peers whether it be Nylander, Ehlers, Larkin, Ritchie etc, people get their panties in a bunch and start flipping $&!# because they can't handle any criticism towards the local kid. But how exactly do we judge Virtanen's performances without some form of benchmark?