It's more like a sports team that had to rebuild because they'd only drafted in the top 20 once in 7 years or whatever and had spent draft capital (2nd to 4th round picks) to pursue a championship. Pretty normal behaviour for a veteran-laden club.
I don't think anyone is going to argue that Gillis had a good drafting history. Unless 2012 and 2013 produce a 100% hit rate on "possible" NHLers such as Gaunce, Subban, Shinkaruk, Cassels, and so on, his overall drafting record is going to be sub-standard. That's not much of a debate. But it's also not entirely unexpected based on where the Canucks were drafting.
The point, though, is that people keep tossing Gillis in the gutter and bringing up the handful of mistakes he made (and he did make them) to counter Benning's one-year parade of ongoing mistakes. It's irrelevant -- and, moreover, not particularly compelling or damning of Gillis. More than anything it serves to highlight just how many blunders Benning has made in a compressed window.
Why don't people just defend Benning on what he's done? I presume because it gets a bit cumbersome to have to list the number of things people don't agree with and try to explain the possible tortured logic that this management group went through to get there: "I don't agree with A, but I can see how in some light, if you looked at it this way, maybe there's a way Benning thought..."