It's pretty hard to say at this stage that the team hasn't improved. Obviously the cattle is better but I think an honest assessment of the squad's quality at the start of the season would have pegged us round about where we are now: clear of spoon danger but just as far from finals. FWIW I have it on decent authority that the powers that be within the club weren't expecting finals this year - it was always down as a progress season and there will be more expectation next year.
What I keep coming across at the moment is the idea that NRL is not a game about your star players but about the mid-to-bottom level of the roster. The 17th best player on your roster is going to play even when everyone is fit and with injuries you're going to need to rely on players 20-30, a lot. As we've seen, when we can put close to our best 17 on the park we're pretty competitive. We fall in a heap when we need to use the bottom end of the roster - and we haven't even been particularly unlucky with injuries this year.
That's why I think a big focus of Richardson's was getting rid of the dead wood, and why I think we'll focus in this off-season on turning over more of the bottom 10-15 players. With KPP, Taylan May and Makasini, and - hopefully - a better year out of Pole there shouldn't be an obvious weakness in the first choice side. But we need proper, first-grade standard depth: better options to come in than Staines, Hope, Sukkar (who could improve but clearly isn't there yet), Fa'atape and so forth, and a bit more reliability out of the backup middles.
What this also means is that we're only going to become competitive in the long run when we are producing first-grade quality juniors, year in year out, as a matter of course. These players, 20-30 on the roster, are going to be on low salaries (especially when you're relying on the free agent market, and thus paying overs, for your stars). Yes, there are occasional diamonds that can be picked up from the discard pile - but it's not reliable.
