On the flip side, I can see us being the next Gold Coast. A club that hasn't played finals in a decade having to shed players on salary dumps. That Laird appears to not have had large chunks frontloaded is very concerning. We're potentially ponying up above the odds on lots of signings.
At some point you do need to get rewarded for development - ok we've offered more to Keane than Collingwood would have. Theres also a massive sunk cost in just trading him and then drafting an 18 year old who takes 4+ years to develop....
I am all for trading people like Laird, but there are far too many posters who just think that trading someone like Keane would automatically be a 'win'. We might end up with absolutely nothing for him and suddenly have another gap in the team to fill.
One difference between us and the Gold Coast is they are a team who play in front of 80 suppoters every week, for all of our faults - playing for the AFC is at least in most players eyes a big club. We have 40k+ supporters at the games, who are passionate.