I've been hanging around MC the Ms blog-o-sphere for what ... 5 years now? 
I do believe this may the first time that there has actually been prolonged discussions about player DEVELOPMENT. 
Okay, maybe I'm projecting -- but my sense of the past half decade is that "prospects" were viewed in one of two ways ... what great stats they were putting up ... or what great stats they would put up once they "developed".
Mind you, there WERE posts about a guy needing to fix this weakness or that weakness ... but no real categorization of the chaotic nature of ACTUAL player development.
And what I draw from this revelation is this ... the REASON that nobody had discussions about player development is because it wasn't happening.  For most of the first decade of the 21st century the Ms simply drafted (or signed international FAs) see-ball, hit-ball types and they climbed the ladder until they could no longer see the ball.
So, the question for me is ... did guys who have been following the Ms for decades just gotten loads smarter than they were 5 years ago ... or is the discussion an artifact of actual player "development" occuring?
It's sort of the "uncertainty principle" in reverse.  Can an observer remain unaffected when watching an experiment?
I've been fairly down about the 2011 prospects for Seattle, (pun intended).  While most might consider this thread just one more in a laundry list of prospect dissections.  I'm thinking it may in possibly the weirdest connection I've ever made, the evidence I've been looking for that player development has returned to the Ms farm system.

...to start my day off right.  Thanks for that, Sandy.  Glad to see see a quarter million words on the subject dismissed because we APPARENTLY didn't CAPITALIZE enough LETTERS to GET your ATTENTION.
I'm sorry you've missed all the fine prospect discussions we've been having for the last half-decade.  I admit, the Ms made it hard to notice prospect development happening, because they traded away anyone they actually got through the process (Choo, As-Cab, Sherrill, Jones, etc) or failed to develop all the "talents" they signed or drafted (every prospect other than Felix, basically - I consider Putz a lucky accident since it was another pitcher that taught him the forkball).
But just because you weren't there when the tree fall in the forest, let's not assume it was silent when it fell.  
I'd like to think a lot of people have gotten a lot smarter about prospects in an age when complete minor league stats finally became available and weren't guarded with secret handshakes, masonic oaths and yearly subscriptions.
But by all means, pat yourself on the back (or whatever body part you choose) and congratulate yourself on summiting the mountain first.
Feel free to ignore all the flags planted there before your arrival - or mine.
~G

Obviously, my post was clear as mud.
It was not my intent to impune the work of the many posters, (especially Doc), that have posted their thoughts and analyses of prospects for oh these many years.  I have the greatest of respect for all of them.
Perhaps an example -- back at DOV, Doc once posted an analysis of Jeff Clement, where he noted that Clement had a hole in his swing ... and that is why he was back in AAA.  That's great work - valuable - and astute.
What never got published was ... "Jeff Clement has fixed the hole in his swing."
My point is that the Clements and Reeds and Wlads of the past never really changed.  Oh, somebody might pop up and put up better numbers than ever before, (Adam Jones), but the aspect that was ... lacking ... were explanations - especially "predictive" explanations for production spikes. 
For all the excitement about Mike Wilson early last year, he was pretty much posting the same line in 2010 that he posted in 2008 with little notice. 
The difference is in speaking about actual change in hitters showing up in their stats and then postulating on exactly what they are doing differently as opposed to mostly just speaking of what ought be done that might result in player development.
Hey, maybe I'm full of it.  I'm talking about a subtle change in the prospect discussions that I'm perceiving.  I haven't done a 'study' on prospect posts to support my instinct here.  And the best evidence I could give to support my view is that I certainly was not looking for something different, which is no evidence at all.
I'm hearing a change of key, if you will.  Prospect posts have been in the key of Bb and they've somehow modulated up to D.  I think this is a good thing.  And I think what I'm feeling is because in prior years there was scant actual player development to discuss ... only prospect watching. 

Still don't get where you're coming from, Sandy.  Up until very recently, there were only basic stats on minor leaguers.  Walks, Ks, hits, OBP...that's still most of what we've got, though we're getting much better.  There's still a huge lack of video. So how do you get predictive about swings and pitching motions with players who are barely seen?
If two hitters, lets call them Halman and Balentien, have similar eye rates in A+ (~.21 batting eyes for both) is one worth more than another?  It was my contention that Balentien was a better bet to improve his eye and that he would in AA.  He did, but dropped his power to do so.  I also contended he would get his power back and keep the eye, which he also did.
When he got jerked around in the bigs and shipped back to AAA his stats plummeted.  This concerned me as a sign or mental weakness and needing positive strokes he wasn't getting, and it was repeated with the Reds.  I thought he just needed to go to a smaller park and get a better shot from a more committed management staff.
Balentien is now going to try his hand in Japan.  Halman is still here.  I was "right" about everything with Balentien...but Halman may still have the better major league career.
But how much of that was guessing rather than predictive?  What counts as scientific and what counts as "my gut says...?"
How do you predict a new pitch added to a repertoire?  I was very dismissive of Putz as a major leaguer after having paid close attention to his minor league career.  He simply did not have an offspeed offering and his amazing FB wasn't enough.  He was a bad starter and an okay reliever.  That's it.  Then Everyday Eddie taught him the forkball and his career exploded into the stratosphere.
I hated Matt Thornton, and the White Sox gleefully took him off our hands, made a minor correction to his landing on the pitch and he's been an outstanding reliever ever since.
I said Mangini used too much of an upper-body swing in college and until he connected his hips he wouldn't be especially useful - but once he did his power should play anywhere.  He fixed it and posted a pretty monster year for a 3B in a pitcher's park, while injured.
But I couldn't tell you, "Putz just needs to learn a forkball to be awesome" or "Thornton has a leg issue to correct" or "Mangini will get the hip thing right in 2010, and then watch out."
I did point out that Mangini had his results change in June of 2009 just watching the numbers, and I had high hopes for it carrying over to 2010 as he finally found some of that power.  But without video of his May swing and his July swing, how would I know whether he corrected it, or was just lucky?
How predictive would you like us minor league prospectors to be when we have limited video from inopportune times in a player's career, limited stats, limited in-person exposure...
All we can do is tell you who we find to be interesting and why, and what we've seen in their paths so far.  Maybe give some anecdotes from friends who have seem him, or try to provide nuggets gleaned.  Grabbing a couple of appendages, sight unseen, and declaring "elephant" instead of "tree" or "snake" isn't the easiest thing in the world even for the people who are paid to do it by the teams themselves.
What type of "predictive player development" conversation would you like to see?  When people got all excited about Mike Wilson I tried to point out that his own manager was batting him 8th or 9th, so he was getting as few ABs as possible and nowhere near the MOTO to boot.  More evidence that his own manager and the big club didn't see him as an option, because as you state his line was unchanged from 08.
But that's not predictive, just informative.  If you want more wild guessing about prospects and their assumed changes and to fill the blog-o-sphere with incorrect assumptions and unsubstantiated rumor in the name of being predictive instead of informative, I'm sure we can oblige, but I'm not sure how that helps anyone.
Nobody could say, "Clement has fixed the hole in his swing" because he hadn't, but also because very few people had access to Clement on a continual basis to monitor it.  Those of us who love and follow the minors do our best to use what we've observed (in stats or in person) across multiple seasons to inform those with less time to spend/waste about what the minors holds.  And apparently our efforts to keep people informed isn't done in a way that meets your approval.
What are you asking for?
~G

That the Mariners were not developing many players, and the ones that did develop they did not keep.  I said as much in my original (and yes, terse) response to Sandy.
But when Sandy posts things like "the question for me is...did guys who have been following the Ms for decades suddenly get loads smarter..." then yes, I view that as an attack on those aformentioned followers of the system.  "Either you were stupid for so long it's incredible you're still breathing...or the Ms just never developed anybody so there was nothing to talk about."
Assuming that everyone who ever watched the Mariners and talked about prospects - for "decades" as Sandy says, so basically back to the dawn of the franchise - is a bunch of imbeciles and labeling that as Option A might not be the best way to start a conversation on a subject.
It offended me because Doc and Jay Yencich and Cameron and Churchill and Jon and the rest, me included, have put in a lot of time and effort to get the word out to the Seattle community on who might play for them in future years and what we get back or give up in trades.  And we also tried to have the very conversations Sandy claims we've never had, or that were completely unhelpful and were missing the boat if we did have them.
Jason Churchill is not my favorite minor league voice.  That doesn't mean I think he's an idiot who's been wasting my time until the current year as Sandy indicates was one of the two possibilities he was weighing.
I happen to find that offensive, but I do understand that mileage does vary.  I'd rather just talk baseball, I just still can't figure out what Sandy wants to talk about. 
If it's just that "wow, it's nice that the Mariners finally have started developing prospects, instead of 5-tool batters who can't hit and 6'7 pitchers who can throw 95 but can't find the zone with a GPS device and a team of bloodhounds" then I'd have been happy to cosign that notion right off the bat.
I still do.  The Mariners have sucked at player development for as long as I've been following it.  Their track record on ditching all useful players and keeping only the flops borders on intentional at this point. 
It's why I'm hoping Zduriencik is around for a while - the remodeling job he's done on our entire minor league process in just 2 years is remarkable.  I still don't know if he can put together a major league squad that can win, but with enough internal success stories he might be able to do it by default.
I'd like to find out for sure.
~G

Regardless of whether Sandy was stating what I thought he was stating, he's absolutely owed the benefit of the doubt.
Spent the last hour going over a few other posts he's made (the man is both pithy and verbose) and I think his use of reducto ad absurdem at times strikes me as a "when did you stop beating your wife?" sort of loaded question.
I think it it's an interpretation fault with me, and the reaction fault is mine as well.  I apologize, Sandy - you deserve better and you'll get it.
Thanks for the call to reason, ghost.  We'll see if we can do more baseball with less drama.
~G

And re-reading my comment about not getting smarter ... I can understand the misunderstanding.
I was, in fact, intending to compliment the intelligence of the prospect watchers, not impune it.  As ghost noted, the prospect watchers haven't had anything to predict, because there has been so little change in the many prospects that have flooded through the system.
My note on 'predictive' ability is not meant to suggest that prospect watchers can easily peg the next guy to morph into something better.  But, Doc has noted in various pieces over the years, (and I've seen it stated elsewhere), a science only becomes a "hard" science, when it becomes predictive.  Mendeleev wasn't brilliant for simply creating the periodic table of charts -- he turned chemistry into a PREDICTIVE science by supplying additional elements that had not been discovered at the time AND stating what their properties would be.
SABRmetrics are too tied up in human chaos to likely ever become a completely "hard" science.  But, I think it's the understood goal of most scientists that they are in search of predictive theories -- be it what the properties of gallium may be or the effect of load and stresses on static structures. 
My intended implication was -- "they aren't getting smarter, because they've always been brilliant" -- but they've not had an opportunity to actually follow "developing" players for most of a decade.  I just did a lousy job of communicating that.

I have to agree with Ghost.  I value tremendously the input from G, Jay, Dr. D, Sandy and the rest of the Ms blogosphere.  It seems to me that if there are two possible ways of interpreting/reading a post, and one way of reading it is completely inconsistent with the way the author has posted in the past, then we should give him the benefit of the doubt.  Sandy's been pointing out the recent dearth of Ms player development for quite a while, and in that context his post makes sense to me, and I (for one) didn't see any insulting intent.