Great work of late with some context around these stats mate.
I will add that there are intangibles around the pack, particularly in the middle, that are hard to quantify, but which have a massive bearing on the current game.
Most of it centres around the ruck, but elements such as strength of first-up contact, ability to hold the player up before bringing to ground, ability to prevent offloads and the likelihood of whether a player will be able to win the wrestle enough to a) get to marker effectively and b) allow their own line to be set.... are all pivotal and hard to quantify.
I think that the last few years, this year especially, our control of the ruck (and those intangibles above), have contributed HEAVILY to our issues with the pack, rather than statistical output alone. I'd include line speed in D (or lack thereof) as another glaring shortfall; again, hard to quantify.
Alluding to what I've mentioned already, you could perhaps metricise some of those with stats such as opposition set distances, PCMs or offloads I guess, though they don't often tell the entire story.
I think it's both at the end of the day.
That is; we need to improve the pack with a bit more 'quality' AND, we need to (badly) improve our control of contact and the ruck, which you can tie line speed into as well.
If we slowed the ruck down by half a second on average, limited opposition's set distances by 3-5m on average and increased our line speed by a couple of metres (till contact) on average, then I think the output of our forwards, exactly as you've presented them so well, would prove to be far more beneficial than they have thus far.
