I agree to some extent, but we're still scraping the supposed scum off the floor and hoping it's not scum. What we pay means we either get low-cost players who have not proven worthy of much compensation (Turner, Elam, Sanborn, Murray, Williams, Campbell, Jones) or players nearing the end of their career (Thomas, Sanders, Fowler).
It's understandable that you have to add some of those kind of FAs, but that doesn't mean you've improved the position. You may have just swapped one low-quality player for another and in some cases, you may have gotten worse (Lewis for Elam, Turner for Lawrence/Golston, for instance).
Now, we still have the draft to go, but we didn't use free agency to clearly improve the roster. Our pro scouts/coaches have to be proven to have been right about their evaluations of these low-cost FAs for that to happen. Of course, like you said, at least this time we seemed to be picking the low-cost FAs that we wanted from the start instead of waiting for them to be picked through and then choosing from what was left. We'll see if that changes anything.