Few things...
The players are soft, at least the core ones, but they're young, I'm pretty confident they'll grow into more complete players as they grow, Matthews will never be Lindros and they won't be "gritty" like you guys want but in the current NHL Crosby is gritty, I think something in that stratosphere is achievable, most guys aren't like that at their age.
Babcock is not making them soft and he preaches "hard work" but his idea of that IS the stick checking that everyone hates, he wants his defense to be passive and boring, literally all of his teams have been that way.
You guys are understating how big of a get Muzzin is, everyone's sad we don't have Martin to sit in the pressbox while Dubas brought in a defensively sound, gritty, dman who can be out there for 20 plus minutes a night. That is a HUGE acquisition, considering he's been on the job for a year, Lou was looking for a top 4 dman his entire tenure and we were supposed to have to trade Nylander for ****ing Montour. Honestly Muzzin might be my favourite Leaf at this point, really hope we can keep him.
This team plays with a general lack of passion even beyond grittiness which is depressing and sucks. Really hoping a coaching change sparks them at least somewhat, we have one of the most boring teams in hockey.
I love Kadri and still think his suspensions were bull but he didn't bring the physicality as often as we remember and he was ridiculously penalized for it when he did. Barrie made sense as an acquisition, though I too would've preferred a Muzzin clone, thats just not realistic, this guy should've been good, still could be. And I wish Kadri returned a dman with term. Komarov and Polak are also being overhyped, though I liked them too.
I get that the Islanders are good right now but we do not want to be them, that team does not have the horses to compete year in year out and we should be a lock for the playoffs every year. This is what the Leafs blew it up for in the first place, to accumulate high end talent. The Leafs are not a veteran team so I'm not shocked they don't play like one, but I'm not going to give up on this extremely talented group of players even if they sometimes make it difficult.
And yes, on a whole this season has really sucked so far.