Not to be negative, allentown, but it sounds to me that what would have appeased you would have been some kind of "show" signing or move - something like the Lance Parrish signing, or the Gregg Jefferies signing, or the Thome signing. What all those "for show" deals had in common? They didn't lead to winning.
One of the things that I like most about the current management - and one of the things that's different from the past - is that they show no evidence of "feeding the fans" with maneuvers that are as much PR as substance...and they aren't leaking about what they "almost" did, either. For the first time since 1981, I no longer have the feeling that at some level, the marketing department is calling the shots regarding talent evaluation.
Unlike you (apparently), I simply don't care whether the Phillies spend "a lot" or "a little." I care only about long-term results. I fully expect that achieving such results will require spending "a lot" at appropriate times - but I'm not going to pass judgment, in advance, about what those times and opportunities are. You're welcome to second-guess them about why they didn't spend $X dollars in a given off-season, but instead spent $Y dollars - but IMHO, the correlation between those spending levels and long-term results is (while probably positive) not necessarily all that strong.
For example, the Phils' pool for this international signing period was $5.6 million. We don't know how much they actually spent - only that it was "more" than the pool amount. You are upset that "they didn't exceed the pool by 50%" (although we don't know they didn't do that, it doesn't seem likely). But what we're talking about here is $2.8 million dollars, less whatever they actually did spend beyond the pool amount. So, $2.5 million, more or less. How did you want to see that spent? One one player? On two or three lesser players? No matter how you spend that, the odds are that you don't get a major-leaguer out of it. It seems to me that you only go there if you have an opportunity to get somebody whose chances are unusually good. I mean, you're not talking about blowing through the pool limit in a big way, signing multiple big-ticket prospects.
You could argue that $2.5 million is chump change to ownership (and it is), so why not spend it? The counter is, do you spend to an arbitrary limit just to spend, or because you think you're buying value? I suspect the Phillies would argue that they saw no specific opportunity that warranted spending that extra couple of $ million...and there's no way for us to really know, independently, that there was such an opportunity that they "passed up."
Again, for me the only thing that matters is results. It's far too soon to assess MacPhail/Klentak on the basis of results (and will be, for a couple more years, at least). To me, that means either I refrain from trying to assess them much, for now, on the basis of process evaluation, or else I make rather arbitrary assessments, based on process rather than results, that are more likely to reflect my own biases than anything objective.