Look i'd agree with you, but Hinkley had the opportunity to play the structure he apparently craved, just not with his best players.
I agree that Lobbe completely shitting the bed and forgetting how to play hurt, and having to move Ryder to ruck ruined that plan a bit. But instead of picking the obvious next tall forward in line to maintain the structure, Ken completely abandoned the structure and we had problems all season in moving the ball.
If Ken cared about playing adequate talls he would have played those talls and taught his players how to play to that system while he waited to find the perfect lineup of bigs. I just can't believe that a coach who "really wants to play a 3 KPF structure" would have spent the vast majority of his time coaching playing a 1 KPF structure. It doesn't make sense.
I agree that the personnel issues between 2015 and 2016 were different, but I saw the same major issue really. If we win the stoppages we're fine, although we don't enter the forwardline well, but we manage. If we have to move the ball from defence to attack we play into the hands of opposition sides by not kicking to the advantage of our players, turn the ball over and concede. When moving the ball we see very little movement ahead of the ball, we see the ball user either shrug his shoulders and bomb, or try a 1-2 handball to generate some run, or we see a turnover. Every other team in the league seems to have a basic system to move the ball forward through a zone. We don't seem to have any real system to do it. We rely on the big boot of Broadbent or the individual brilliance of Pittard or Ebert.
Until we have an adequate system for that, we might make the 8 on class, but we'll never really be successful. Our forwards will continue to underperform. We'll continue to get ground out of games by teams that we should be absolutely wiping off the park.
As i've said, I don't actually think our skills are that bad. Our apparent skill issues stem from our inability to deal with moving the ball through a zone.