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I love your passionate defense of Jack's trading skills, but I can't buy in, Rick. :-)
Guti was bad luck.  He's a good baseball player who had an undiagnosed disease that has not been able to be controlled for him to be the regular his talent would allow him to be.  Picking Guti out of a hat as trade return along with Vargas was Jack's good trade.
A one-year swap of Vargas (who we were not gonna re-sign) for Kendrys (who we might, and who would help for all of 2013, and would likely be worth a QO) was also a good move.  It was still only a one-year bandaid though.  Jack didn't FIX anything, he just rolled the problem to next year.
So let's say I give you those two, even though only one of them was supposed to be a long-term piece. Who else?
Cliff Lee was a tremendous trade to dump some prospects before they lose value and get an All-Star.  We then blew the flip part of the trade, but it was a nice 3-month add. How does that help us now?
Jaso for Lueke was a nice get.  So nice we tossed Jaso for a year of Morse.  Jaso is continuing to be a quality part time player who demolishes righties for our division rival and has another year til FA, while Morse was a 1-year injured rental who is gone. Long term help swapped for a short-term patch that didn't actually patch anything.
I can absolutely blame Zduriencik for spending the offseason trying to add a guy who did not want to come here while our other options dwindled. If you know you're on his No-Trade, maybe you should figure out whether he'll wave it before you waste 3 weeks making a deal that can't be made. You might as well tell me I can't blame him for not signing free agents because he made offers, they just took other deals. ;-)
League for Morrow was a cute patch, but you could have traded Morrow for any number of things as the #5 pick in the draft who was striking out 9+ dudes a game in Seattle. Let's call it a wash.  Getting a 5'10 reliever for a HOFer in Ichiro isn't exactly a huge win, as much as I like Farquhar, but at least Danny is a piece for the future. Ryan was a 2-year risk that helped tank the offense and couldn't be flipped, but didn't cost us much.
But getting Thames got us nothing. Blowing the Fister deal got us nothing (well, Furbush, so a large downgrade - Fister was 9th in the league in WAR from 2011-2013, the years we coughed up that were essentially free). Not one trade has brought in anyone as good as Fister was going out (not counting Lee's 3 months) and the only long-term pieces we've added in trade have been bullpenners. If you wanna run it out, I'm sure we're a net negative in trade WAR.
At some point Zduriencik is gonna have to add players who will be here a while AND are plus. He has plenty of trade pieces but because he can't add ANY veterans worth anything, we feel like we still can't trade them because we'll need them. If we had Fister, we could have traded Paxton or Walker for lumber. We tried anyway, as you said, and still might have to.
Because this is year 6 of the rebuild and you can't point to anything more than 7th inning arms as trade pieces we've added for our next pennant run.  Swapping players for other mediocre players is not improving the team, it's just shuffling the deck. And so far that's all Jack has been able to do.
I really hope the next time is the one where he nails it. We need it.
~G