I'm up and down on this point. I don't know enough about the instruction he's getting in Florida to be able to say with definitive remarks that he shouldn't have been with a professional team this year. I think if he were a position player, it would very clearly be a case of management not making the right call. However, considering that the goaltender position is one where a player can develop just as much with coaching and being allowed to move slowly through the system.... it's tough for me to say. For example, if he went back to Junior and posted a dominant season but didn't learn anything about how to be a better goaltender just used his increased athleticism and experience to beat other teams.... did he really have a net gain on his development that year?
If they're working with Altshuler and breaking his game down to make him a more effective player, giving him spot starts to test his new techniques, then it may not be a wasted year. They could have spotted a deficiency in his technical skills that needed to be addressed with professional coaching and decided that it was worth a year of limited starts to get that remedied. There's just a lot we don't know about why he didn't play enough.