They made lots of moves, they drafted pretty well and got their elite G, elite scorer and elite dman to go with their captain and elite faceoff guy to build around. They made moves to try and put a competitive team in front of them until they were ready, sadly injuries hampered that more than everything . Those weren't "shortcuts" there were attempts to give those young players a competitive culture so they didn't become the Oilers or Sabres. I'm not sure what's bad about that.
I'm not sure where zegras and MacT come into the picture, but I don't care about Gunther, id rather have a top 3 dman in there.
Nonetheless those core guys managed to develop nicely and they made decent progress until last year, which is when bold moves needed to be made, and they weren't.