We haven't had a major free agent signing in years, and no i don't think Olsen counts. He was clearly on his last legs. In free agency our MO is to go bargain shopping. Bring in a bunch of guys with potential that have never lived up to it. We spend a ridiculous sum of money doing so and end up with mediocre players that never make a splash.
Our Super Bowl team used free agents quite liberally. Bennett, Zach Miller, McDonald and Avril all were essential pieces that came out of free agency. We can even expand the list to Browner, but he was more of a project from the CFL. Without those guys we might not have a ring to our name.
The majority of the players you mentioned that brought us success and were the cornerstones for our early success were deemed mediocre or obscure talents... or at best were seen as having the potential to do well before we got them. The formula hasn't changed. We had success early and have struggled in trying to plug players into a system that was becoming antiquated due to rule changes and talent loss at key positions. It's hard enough to replace the likes of an Earl Thomas, Chancellor, Avril, etc. Harder when the game is changing and you've dedicated time to trying to replace those players in the same system... or a tweaked version of it.
I give the FO credit for admitting they were too committed to trying to make what they had work, rather than changing the approach entirely. Pete said they were stubborn.
So I don't know that its safe to make forecasts about how we might do in this new paradigm, based on how we did trying to piece together something we've now clearly acknowledged we've abandoned.
If anything, it would seem the best baseline comparison might be to when we were building the team from scratch. And this go-round, we have more pieces to start with than we did in 2010.
I also think history will be kinder to our drafts when we see realize the impact players like Brooks, Taylor, Brown, Eskridge, Lewis, etc will have on this new generation of Hawks.
I think the biggest threat will be keeping the team motivated if things start slowly and the wins are as hard to get this year as they were last. But then again, Pete had the guys fired up in week 18 and playing as though they had a playoff birth on the line.