You need to supplement these young players with some type of actual proven veteran help if you want to aid their development.
I agree with that, however you can do that by getting cheap/smart UFA acquisitions a'la Lovejoy/Murray/Crawford/Kulikov/Boyle rather than Neal/Okposo/JVR type signings.
You can't just solely rely on a young core to carry the team.
In order to have any realistic expectation of building a contender after adding expensive pieces (once you do that, it's a point of no return, now rebuild either succeeds or fails), you need your young core to provide better results than it did so far.
Assuming one contract given to an elite defenseman that would only go through to his age 34 season would set this franchise back years is quite the overreaction.
One Hamilton wouldn't (in fact I'm not that against bringing Hamilton, even on 7y/63M contract), however three Hamilton-type acquistions would mean commitment of a large part of the cap into few players that would be on the decline once our core hits their primes. Bringing Hamilton wouldn't be the end of the world, we are under the salary floor anyway, however making 4-5 moves like this could potentially kill the rebuild.
Again, for Buffalo and Arizona, there wasn't a one move that failed their rebuilds, there were few major blunders and a lot of minor ones. For Shero/Fitzgerald, I think there were mostly minor ones (flushing down the toilet a lot of 2nd/3rd round picks), however Lamoriello has made two major mistakes with Schneider trade and not forfeiting the Matteau pick. Those 2 moves have negatively affected our draft position in ALL 2013-2016 drafts because without Schneider we could have been at the absolute bottom of the standings.
You see that? Two moves and the butterfly effect has insane negative effects on the franchise.
Also talking about accelerating a rebuild that has gone on for 7+ years at this point is again quite overdramatic.
The optimal moves depend on the assets that you currently have, not how long you've been tanking. Arizona was missing playoffs since 2011 and decided, in 2017, to accelerate a bit by trading #7 + DeAngelo for Stepan and Raanta and it was an awful move (the fact that Lias Andersson busted eases a pain a bit but still it was a terrible move for the rebuilding team).
The length of rebuilding doesn't matter if you don't take advantage of the draft positions you get because of that, you can rebuild for 20 years and if you don't draft key pieces to building a good team, you can still be bad.
