You can say what you said about Carlson and Burns, but these guys at the end of the day got their contracts based off of point production (maybe not Carlson, he's actually pretty decent on D), which is what the NJ fans in this thread keep emphasizing when talking about Hamilton. SJ and WSH also knew full well the age of the players.
And Skjei, and I'll even say Gardiner aren't grossly overpaid. Skjei's probably a $4-4.5 million player. Gardiner, much like Hamilton, was coming off of several statistically successful seasons for Toronto prior to us signing him, despite what everyone was saying about his defensive play, like Hamilton. And no, I'm not comparing Hamilton's overall play to Gardiner because that would be silly. I'm just saying Gardiner had limitations that made his contract unnecessary for Carolina
And I would say at this point, Carolina doesn't have any horrible contracts. Don't know if you watch The Hockey Guy on youtube, but he recently did a video on the worst contracts for each team. He said there were a couple teams that he felt didn't have horrible contracts, with Carolina being one of them. I think we have several players above what they should be (Skjei, Gardiner, Nino, Staal), but none of them are grossly overpaid for what they produce. And that's the point of why Carolina ultimately didn't sign him. It wasn't because the cap team was too cheap, it was because they didn't see the value of signing him for $7 million + aav when they couldn't rely on him to play top pairing minutes when it mattered.