While I adore your schtick and have said so many times, you are also good at speaking truth to power sometimes. But I think us Dotchin-ites are getting a bit misrepresented here. I (personally) don't think he's a top 4 Dman in the NHL right now. Maybe he develops into that stay at home #3, Hjalmarsson type, but he probably doesn't. He's probably always going to be a guy that can't carry a pairing, but can support a better player on a pair. If he's a guy you can slot into any three pairings with a better player (and let's remember he's a righty - so that means he gets to slot with our better Dmen/Prospects), that allows us as a team a ton of flexibility. We saw it last year. Suddenly we were able to split up Hedman and Stralman, which improved our defensive game by a ton.
So ranking prospects kind of gets tricky then. Is he going to be a better *player* than some of these guys (Raddysh, Erne, Howden)? Probably not. They have more skill, more talent, and certainly more upside. Is he going to be a more important part of our team? Jury is still out, but I would take the RD who can play on any pairing over a middle-six winger, for instance.
It's not easy to "do no harm" at the NHL level. We kind of throw that out disparagingly at guys like Dotchin. But "do no harm" for a 23 year old Dmen playing 20 minutes a night is pretty ****ing impressive to me. So at the end of the day, I may overvalue him - there's an element of judgment and taste to this - but I also think the detractors are getting a little carried away with trying to contextualize his performance.