Corsi and Fenwick and On Ice GF/GA% are actually also indicative of defensive play, to a degree- Chychrun is alright at defendin without the puck,, but he's great at moving the puck out and creating a transition play. He isn't as good as Prime OEL, for sure. But he is only 24, has been playing on a lot worse teams than OEL was, and hopefully is only going to get better, because while OEL was fine for a lot of years, he eventually became an even worse Yandle- coincidentally pretty soon after he turned 25! Which no doubt was initially probably mostly because of Tippett, but never got better. It doesn't really matter though. He's paid half of what OEL was, and at that point of time I would've asked for the same thing for OEL that we all want from Chychrun.
Anyways my point was to mostly point out that you were wrong about several things you asserted in your initial post. So yeah. It's really really hard to quantify quality of competition, and Chychrun hasn't played a ton of games so it's even harder to quantify because there's no good /60 or /GP stats for it. But with all that said, Chychrun actually did have a really high quality of competition before last year.