Bitter?  No.  But if you choose to be, then that's a choice you make.

Naive?  Yes.

What you guys are really hoping for is lightning in a bottle.  I hate to tell you this, but that's a lot more like Don Quixote than you realize.  IOW - pure fiction.  It just doesn't happen all that often and when it does, it's through manipulation and prone to a shorter life than you'd hope for.

You want to be more realistic.  You want to build and that process is normally slow.  You go from Anderson to McCoy to Weeden.  You improve with each step.  Weeden may only be a slight upgrade over McCoy but the consensus (even here I think) is that he is an upgrade.  Would have been nice to go from an Anderson to a Brady, but that happens in storybooks, at least most of the time.

We've been reading dime novels as fans.  It's time to make the switch to Beowulf.  It's going to be hard reading at times, but we may wind up with a classic.