Is the "even casuals weren't expecting us to complete" part supposed to make that opinion more legitimate?
People defend the FO because the vast majority of criticisms are vapid and idiotic.
I don't even think there is an obvious straw man in what I said. If anything, you're the one(s) constructing a straw dude because you're transforming a complicated decision based on probabilities and chance into a binary one, after the outcome is known, with obvious risks where the FO made some type of categorically and objectively incorrect historic decision, which is just not the case.
How do you know they didn't test the waters only to find out that the market for him wasn't very strong? See:
I'm not ecstatic with the eventual return for JD but I'm also not going to piss on my favourite team for taking a chance and making a semi-reasonable effort to complete for a wild card spot--it just didn't work out. A lot of s*** went very wrong for the MLB team this year but we could have reasonably expected a lot of the core players to be better and for the team to at least have played meaningful baseball this month. At least they could get a top 10 pick out of this dumpster season.