Mate. You're just dropping buzzwords and lingo. I don't think you have a strong grounding in the facts.
Most of the junior/pathways coaches at the Knights in the 00's/10's until Tinkler took over were unpaid volunteers. There were no resources. What little investment there was was just in the senior squads.
Tinkler reinvested money in junior development but via this specific "high performance" program dreamed up by Graham Murray, basically the young teenagers the club liked the most at that time got in and various kids got rejected, including, famously, a fat Indigenous kid called Latrell Mitchell. Many of the names from that program will be familiar to you: Lamb, Cogger, Jones, Hoy, Starling, Crossland, Madden, Musgrove, Pezet. Getting a spot in that program was way more likely if you had a dad with the right connection, eg, one who was a former first grader, or best mates with a former Immortal. Before the Knights had a rep for being broke, having a nepotism problem, being incompetently run (obviously no resources doesn't help); then when some money comes in, it's invested in basically the exact opposite way to how Penrith did it - casting as wide a net as possible, training up big squads as equals and not picking a handful of "elite" 14 year olds to concentrate on - and the nepotism, the arrogance, the high handed treatment of potential local affiliates, only got worse.
And then Tinkler turned out to be a paper millionaire and once again the club is completely broke, no resources, bailed out by the NRL, and essentially purchased as a distressed asset by Wests.
It's not an "excuse" to point out that this is a terrible situation to inherit. It's just the reality. This great resource you speak of just wasn't there anymore, don't you get it?
The predecessors of the Hunter JRLA (Newcastle + Maitland & District JRLAs, which merged in 2021 from memory) just did not have the kind of relationship with the Knights that clubs in the catchments of our rivals do. That's how it ends up the case that constantly, way more often than they should have, promising kids from junior clubs in Maitland, Newcastle, etc progressed into the Roosters Harold Matts program, or Manly, or Bulldogs - whereas any promising kid from Redfern playing junior footy is about a 100% chance of joining the Rabbitohs system at that age. And then the kids we actually did keep just were not being as effectively coached as they would be elsewhere, due to the program being under-resourced and relying heavily on unpaid volunteers, which just was not the case elsewhere.
In addition Sydney clubs had basically totally "colonised" traditional Knights areas like the mid north coast, northern central coast, etc. That's our equivalent of what areas like the Blue Mountains, Dubbo etc are for the Panthers. The Panthers rules over those regions with an iron fist. Our equivalent areas are an absolute mess of affiliations with Sydney clubs - I don't know if it can ever be untangled.
This is the problem Wests inherited. If you were going to ding them for anything, I would say they were probably a bit slow to realise the scale of the problem (they are slow on a lot of things), but realise they have, and move they have (COVID of course had a bit of a derailing impact, not great timing for us).
Phil Gould took over as GM of the Panthers in 2011. They weren't in anything like as bad a state as we were. But he didn't just snap his fingers and say "okay now we're an elite development club, look at how many kids play footy out here". He pretty explicitly talked about "five year plans" and was, if you'll remember, pretty widely mocked for how long it took the current junior conveyor belt to really get going. Five years became six, seven, eight, almost a decade, in fact. But get going it did.
Now. Wests Group are not putting as much money into pathways as the Panthers did. But the investment now is significant and it's higher than most clubs in the NRL. Your idol Peter O'Sullivan has stated that he thinks the pathways are in a much better spot than he thought from the outside looking in (again - everyone outside the Knights has long understood the Knights to be a bad development club with significant issues with pathways - Wests can't click their fingers and fix that the moment they arrive, and you only develop a reputation as a development club long after the work to make yourself one is put in). We are seeing promising green shoots re: some of the kids coming through, eg Sharpe is in my opinion our best prospect since, well, Joey, or Bradman if you want to argue the point. And the talent in Matts, Ball atm looks a lot better than what had been there in previous years. Whether the steps being taken are enough? We won't know for sure for 3-5 years, most likely. But they have invested more money and energy in it than anyone we've had at the helm previously. That's just a fact.
It's not a 1:1 thing, but NRLW pathways at all clubs have basically started as a blank slate, and Wests have done as good a job as anyone on that side of the program, so that's at least promising.
Also what Braith was laughing at Wests about was for not firing AOB despite clearly being able to afford the payout, which he thinks makes the club look cheap. But you think we should keep AOB, right? So what's your point there?