If you could have gotten those pieces for free or cheap in a trade, why do you think they watered down O'Reilly's value? That doesn't make sense. Assuming Botterill really did want them, he would have had to give up that value anyway, either in this trade or a different one.
Two things.
First I assume that St. Louis negotiated to put those in to trade cap space because of their other free agent moves. My second assumption for this point assumes the same thing you and others have indicated, the team had to get O’Reilly out and had some moral problem with paying his bonus. Which put Botterill in a limited position of leverage. Which means he had to take some poo to get a few good assets. Could he have gotten a better deal from a team that appreciated the lower cash value of the contract? Very likely, but we can’t know.
Second, Sobotka is a very replaceable player in ufa. For a similar or better contract. Which doesn’t mean that Sobotka has zero trade value, it just means we could have gotten his game without it being part of an O’Reilly trade. Berglund is a less attainable player in free agency for his exact production, at least what he did in the past, but there were a couple ufa’s who produced better last year and signed for shorter term and similar money as Berglund. His contract is the biggest problem of his addition to the trade.
So to many of us, those two guys don’t bring value in a trade for a star player. More than anything they helped make the money work on the Blues end and from the Sabres perspective, that’s a Pejorative Slured reason to include them.
I’d rather have gotten an extra 2nd and spent the money on free agents.
Now the general counter to this is that maybe we couldn’t sign one of these free agents. Which is true, but we can’t know either way. And it’s obvious based on deals in the last 5 years, bottom six options go to bad teams all the time.
Since the only thing we know for sure is that the team seemed to really want to get rid of him, and for some reason really didn’t want to pay anything to him, means that they gave themselves an artificial deadline, which means leverage over themselves, because common sense dictates that they would have gotten a better deal after the bonus was paid.
Not to avoid your last point, but I would be moderately disturbed if Botts really was targeting Berglund and Sobotka, particularly on their contracts at their age.