I don't give a damn what you or any analyst thinks, other baseball heads think the talent in Detroit's system is just fine. If they'd decided they needed to pick anything up this summer I guarantee Dombrowski would have been just fine finding what he needed.
Hindsight is always 20/20 - but every analyst has been saying the same thing about their cupboard being near dry since around 2008. When they traded Miller and Maybin people said their top heavy farm system was totally empty. And then they found a way to flip assets around and wind up with Scherzer. Wind up with Fister. Wind up with Cespedes. Wind up with Price. Their talent in the system has always been enough, and always in the face of claims that they have one of the worst systems in baseball.
The minor league talent they have now is a lot better after dealing Price and Cespedes but it was completely empty before that. They would not have been able to make a deal for a good player this year without dealing someone like JD Martinez or Jose Iglesias (like many of the other deals you mentioned where "somehow finding a way to flip assets" in practice meant trading established all-stars like Curtis Granderson and Austin Jackson.)
I would argue that people have NOT been saying Detroit has had no young talent for years. They may have been rating low on minor league system rankings, but that's always because they've promoted quickly and traded everybody else. If over the last 5-6 years you've looked at their talent outflows and young-major players they've always had plenty of working capital. Until now of course where trades like Jake Thompson (just traded for Cole Hammels by Texas) for sub-replacement reliever Joakim Soria and Doug Fister for sub-replacement reliever Ian Kroll left them having to plug rotation holes with guys like Alfredo Simon.
This is my whole point with Dombrowski: he will take every asset you have and commit it towards winning the World Series this year. It's refreshing in that it's the exact other end of the spectrum from the modern baseball and basketball execs who pathologically horde assets without ever pushing their chips in on a season, and in a lot of circumstances I agree with the approach, but he is more than willing to overpay to get his guy and that can cause problems down the road if the guy he targets doesn't pan out (or say, your Cy Young winner is a free agent and whoops we're paying Victor Martinez, Joe Nathan, Anibal Sanchez, and the ghost of Prince Fielder a combined $50 million a year.)
I think he will do a good job rebuilding the Red Sox because he has a lot to work with, the big question is how much mileage he gets out of inevitable dealing because even just a few big misses can result in prolonged pain like I suspect the Tigers are entering the beginning of.
