If by "NA Specialist" you mean North American coaches, I don't favor hiring North Americans at all. I don't know of any special insight that North Americans have to offer. In Canada, youth hockey is based on the premise of mass development, or to put it another way, sheer numbers. In a nation of 33 million people, every small community within Canada has indoor and outdoor rinks, organized teams, and sufficient coaching to ensure that if anyone in the country has the ability to be a good hockey player, he will have more than ample opportunity to learn to skate, join a team, and get some fundamental development training. Canadians are very forthright in saying that a lot of the special skills training that they do was largely borrowed from Soviet hockey school methodology that they learned back in the '70's and '80's, when they used to travel to the Soviet Union to study it.
By contrast, the percentage of Russian kids who have easy access to the tools to build a hockey career is so small as to be almost anecdotal. My friend Allacbeth who posts here lives in the city of Kemerovo near Novokuznetsk, a city of half a million people for whom winter lasts six months a year. Allacbeth tells me that despite these characteristics, there is almost no hockey at all in Kemerovo. Any kid who has athletic ability and wants to skate plays bandy, which is wildly popular. So many parts of Russia have failed to develop any hockey infrastructure at all. The best hope is that the KHL, which is driving the expansion of organized youth hockey, will continue to build such infrastructure in order to feed needed raw materials to its league.
Hockey schools should be created everywhere, and all of the schools should adopt the methodology found at Traktor hockey school, which sets the gold standard for youth hockey development in my opinion. The best feature of Russian hockey, in my opinion, is the schools. Soviet player development, training and conditioning was the best in the World in its time, and all of those approaches should be revisited, IMO, to see which still apply today. The Canadian approach is really nothing more than spending money to fund mass participation, which is nothing that we didn't already know.
I agree, if you read my whole post it will offer a suggestion to your opinion. Russia has better player development, but NA coaches methods are proven at the club level. Russian national teams are starving for quality coaches. Maybe foreign coaches can be used after the players are through development stage.
For example, past 3 KHL championships won by foreign coaches because they take already developed players and put them into a recipe for success. No denying that Keenan has exceptional tactics which other coaches are lacking. He's been around for so long he just knows how things are done, others don't. Its not just me, Zaripov, Mozyakin and others have also promoted Keenan. Glad Russia wised up and hired a foreigner to take the ropes following Latvia's lead.