I wouldn't frame it that way. My view is that we should be more forward thinking. JTM is a short-term move. Trading Panarin for younger NHL players, picks and prospects would be a long-term move.
The end result might be that we get worse in the short-term, but that's not always a given. You never know how things might shake out. Look at the Gaborik trade. We became a better team by trading away our "star" and adding depth. We then traded the best player we got back in that deal, Brassard, and got back a player who turned out to be even better in Mika.
We've come to the point where Kreider's value has greatly diminished. Imagine if we had traded him over the summer, what we might have gotten for him vs what we will get now. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but we have to be willing to take chances like that, especially when we have traded away so many picks and prospects. If we aren't going to keep replenishing the team through the draft, we have to swap out older players for younger players if we want to remain competitive. And by that, I don't mean just waiting until the player hits rock bottom and then dumping him for whatever we can get. We need to trade value for value to get younger. The JTM trade did not do that.