I think you're totally missing the point here. If Benning and the Canucks were convinced Gaudette wasn't going to be a long-term fit with the team, the time to deal him would have been the off-season. What the fans think shouldn't matter for a confident and experienced NHL GM.
After all, Gaudette was coming off a decent breakthrough season with 12 goals and 33 points in 59 games.....whatever value he might have had in the trade market was at an all-time high then. But no, after going through a miserable 2021 season, his value plummets and that's when Benning deals him. And apparently all he could get was an NHL-AHL 'tweener in Highmore.
In the words of the gambler, "you've got to know when to hold 'em and know when to throw'em." WHEN you trade a player matters. And as other posters have pointed out, Benning consistently gets the timing wrong and devalues his own assets.
If they had a plan to put Gaudette in a larger role and he failed, that would be excusable. Stuff like that happens.
But they clearly did not. There was no preseason this year and in the season opener Gaudette played 8 minutes as the 4th line center. Their 'plan' was that they would leave Gaudette as a depth C where he had been struggling badly defensively and that ... somehow ... he would make a big step forward.
There were two reasonable options for Gaudette last summer :
1) View him as a Toffoli replacement and shift him into those minutes on a scoring line and hope his production takes a big step forward as a scoring winger.
2) If you don't view him as a winger, sell high and trade him because he's clearly not a fit going forward as a C for this franchise.
This decision should have been made in discussions with the player and coaches, and a plan for the asset should have been formulated. Either decision would have been fine. But as usual, when given a choice between Door A and Door B, Jim Benning pulls out a gun and shoots himself right in the dick. They did nothing, didn't really have a plan, stuck him in crap minutes, and destroyed the asset.