A bit arbitrary, why not go from 2009, 2004 or 2000? Anyways that aside, it highlights two things for me. One our crap recruiting until around the Craig era where we were finally willing to go down to the early rounds. We were also willing to assemble a team that were good at doing this. Prior, we lived off our initial recruiting that got us the likes of Roo, Goody, Jameson etc. Second, from around 2002 when our stars were beginning to fade until the Craig era recruiting started to pay dividends around 2012, we were a group of over performing lower quality players. We never should have won as many games as we did, but we got there through professionalism, gameplan and fitness. However, we lacked the talent to go with top sides and when they finally stepped up a level in finals, we simply didnt have another level to go since we were there all minor round just to make the finals with the talent we had. Hence us regularly being bundled out in finals.
All in all, its played out exactly how I think it should have. Just a pity in the late Blight and most of Ayres era we didnt go to early draft rounds and threw away draft picks in trading and didnt assemble a good recruit team otherwise we might have done a bit better from around 2006-now. Also lack of trade in Craig era made our list a bit more stale than it could have been. Craig's stubborness to implement modern tactics (for example rotations) also cost us some good opportunities where we might have done a bit better around 2008/9. Though I doubt that even through any of that era that without the better recruiting we ever had any chance of a premiership.