It is a right for our club
Seriously though, your point is well made - a lot of our recent success is built upon the leadership of the senior players you've named, and their experience of lean times either when we were terrible or their former clubs were (then there's also the addition of Frawley, who moved to chase this nebulous concept of "success"; he'll learn that it's a real thing soon enough).
The impending tragedy is going to come in the next few years, when Hodge, Mitchell, Lake, Burgoyne and Gibson retire, and are then followed not too long after by Lewis, Roughead, and Spangher. That's going to create a vacuum. Now while we have an immense amount of talent on our list, the character that is built by the experience of failure is the foundation of success, and our younger players won't have had that. Perhaps it can be replaced by the mindset they've developed from being raised in a culture of success, but I fear that the easy life they've experienced so far may lead to a certain softness creeping in (I desperately hope that I'm wrong about that though).
The retirement issue is definitely going to be our greatest weakness from 2017 onwards.