Meh. I'm ok with it. If they're paying 500 million dollars they should have some quality plus all everyone was talking about before the season was how McPhee did horrible. Now that they're doing so well, everyone is going back and saying the expansion is too generous.
Plus they have an incredibly small prospect cupboard, so if any of their impact guys like Perron or Neal walk for the big paydays, they don't have NHL ready talent to plug into their place. I'm curious to see where they are in say two or three seasons time.
To the bolded, I don't have any problem with retrospective analysis like this. There is now actual evidence to say how good the talent was that they acquired, whereas before the season it was all just guesswork.
The issue I see is that I don't think the expansion process was calibrated to a salary cap era. I would say that their big advantage isn't that they got to pick one decent player from every team (and have multiple NHL GMs make hideously asinine decisions to let them have two such players). The mega-advantage is that they got to pick contracts. That's an advantage that hasn't ever really applied before in any previous expansions, and on top of that, they had the most favourable talent pool out of any previous expansion. In an era where teams can acquire assets by acquiring a player with a big contract, the ability to start with no bad contracts is worth multiple first-round picks.
And the results are clear now. The talent they got was sufficient not just to keep interest up in their home town, but to be a Stanley Cup contender instantly. You are correct that they have a small prospect cupboard given they've existed for one year, but they also have a favourable cap situation that gives them probably more flexibility to bring these guys back than any other organization.
It just makes me uneasy. It's like a poker tournament where everyone starts with the same number of chips, and then a few hours in you let someone join in, and give them that same starting number of chips.