Easiest thing in the world is to criticize a draft retroactively.
Every team in the league has regrets in this department every year.
The other issue is that people overestimate first rounders, then stunned some failed. I ran the numbers and guys drafted at 21-30 have a 37% chance of playing 200+ games. Let's make it 40% in case a few more (fairly) recent pick make it. That means 60% are outright busts. Most of that 40% who do play 200 games aren't stars, they are average or even below average.
People will get 3 first round picks and declare: "That's it, rebuild is over. We just got 2 top-6 forwards and a top-4 defenseman." Five years later, only 1 of the 3 first rounders made it, and people are stunned how the GM could be this stupid. In fact, he hit about average. Even if the GM gets 2 quality NHLers and 1 is a bust (Kreider, Skjei, Sanguinetti), people can't understand why the GM is such a moron when in reality, he did much better than reasonable expectations.
From 2004 to 2012, we had 10 first round picks. Of them 7 made it (Montoya, Korps, Staal, Del Zotto, Kreider, Miller, Skjei), a pair were busts (Sanguinetti, McIlrath) and one died, but would almost certainly have been at least a low-end NHL, probably much more (Cherry). That's an 80% hit rate. We had two top-10 picks, 6 in the 11-20 range and two more post-20. That is very, very solid.