It's not an accident that you and Danger are both very active and were able to turn your teams around quickly. You can't really check out for a year and then expect to gain ground on teams that are paying attention every day. Which is what a lot of teams in DDL are trying to do. FTD is going to have a juggernaut soon because he's been working the wire and making moves throughout his rebuild. A bunch of other owners will continue to not make any progress.
Hurl, for example, should have been all over Stroman when I was shopping him for a 2nd or 3rd because of a perceived (rightly or wrongly) roster crunch. But he sat there for weeks with no offers until a rich team got richer just because they were engaged and paying attention.
There are teams in the league like 30 games under 0.500 who just ignore offers on guys in their mid-30s. So yeah, they're never going to have good teams.