I think the real issue is that many fans view things over longer periods of time while others view things from season to season.
Every new season a lot of teams can point to one or two things that could have dramatically improved their previous season. If a key player wasn't hurt or suspended, or they had benched a player sooner, or a turnover did not happen, etc. gives teams reason for hope and optimism for the upcoming season.
The real issue though is that at some point, you have to look at the a larger block of time and evaluate that as well. For example, when Garrett was hired, I was not excited about it, but I wasn't down on it either. I viewed it more as a "let's see what happened in 2-3 years" after seeing him turn the team around mid-season.
Now, here we are several years later and there is still not even a deep playoff run. When you go back further, it's been 20+ years since the last time a Cowboys team did that and for better or worse patience is finally starting to disappear even among many fans who have been loyal and annually optimistic despite year after year of failures.
For me, it's not about assigning blame or fault, but rather accepting that what they have been doing has simply not produced tangible post-season results. Given that we are stuck with the same GM and head coach for yet another year forces fans to focus more on the player changes that are being made since that's the only real changes being made because the fourth and fifth tier coaches added will still be following and implementing systems and game plans from the same people.
I think we all know the Cowboys prefer to focus on the draft, which would be fine, but the team also has an annoying habit of starting the season with the rookies, that were drafted to fill holes that were ignored during free agency, sitting on the bench. There are exceptions of course to high first round picks, but overall, the staff seems to look at non-high first round picks as this year's backups and "next" year's starters too many times.
Even if we hit it big in the draft every year, we are eventually going to have trouble keeping our own players so whether we draft them, we sign them as free agents or we trade for them really is going to matter less and less as teams are willing to overpay for even average players.
It's time for this team to stop thinking about the future and start focusing on winning right now. Maybe if the Cowboys were not worth so much money, they would care more about that. As it is, 8-8 to 13-3 and a playoff win every few years seems to be enough for them to maintain the status quo year after year with a few token tweaks thrown in just to create the illusion of improvement.
