I think this is the reason why people aren't happy with Woodward or the Glazers. Forget the debt, forget the money they have taken out of the club. They have basically been playing fantasy manager with United but Woodward is not good at it. There is no reason why he couldn't deal with everything on the non-football side but he clearly likes being involved. We have spent a lot of money since Fergie left. There is no avoiding that. They haven't closed the purse strings. The problem is that they have lurched from one manager to the next and never seem to have any plan. They pay for "marquee" signings who clearly come for the money or are past their best.
They've made mistakes, no doubt about that but it's not been as cynical as you make out. It's not a case of them playing football manager, it's a case of them being naive. For years Utd were able to plod along and regularly qualify for the CL and challenge for titles with little input from the board and owners through the work of Fergie but also the lack of competition at the top of the table. I'm sure I wrote this before but Fergie was effectively a director of football that handled match days - he managed that by leaving training to others, where as your modern manager is a coach that handles match days and leaves the director of football stuff to others. Utd's decline has been because of a perfect storm of so many factors - losing Fergie from both a match day manager pov and the overall running of the football side of things, losing Gill and his knowledge and ability to negotiation with clubs and agents (how many times was Woodward played in the early years?), much greater competition for the top 4 spots and this all came at a time when Utd were about to pay for a lack of investment in the side from the previous 5 years.
Utd have lacked a plan and paid for it but Woodward/the Glazers have to be involved in making that plan and the overall running of the club. Obviously there's a wider point about the owners however as things stand they own the club and have the ultimate say over how much money is spent and how it's being spent. You cannot appoint a DoF, give him a budget and he then has free reign to do as he likes because if he doesn't bring instant success then the money men will start questioning why he spent £50m on an 18 year old/30 year old. Woodward and the owners need to decide on a plan from a financial point of view (budgets, age range of potential signings etc) and then build a team or appoint a DoF that works to that plan.
There are signs our transfer policy is improving though, so while the past has sucked there is some hope in that department. The biggest flaw for me is the appointing successive managers who share nothing in common stylistically. If Ole does leave/get fired then that is the next area to improve on.
Genuine question, in what respect do you see your transfer policy improving? Whether spending £130m on Maguire and AWB represented good value was obviously highly questionable but at least you could say that Utd put some sort of policy in place in the summer, focusing on younger british players as opposed to the scatter gun approach of before. But the Fernandes deal, given that he was available all summer and you didn't move for him, makes it look like you've gone back to the old way of just reacting to what's going on around you. If Fernandes was a carefully scouted and throught through target, who Utd were convinced by then why didn't you make your move in the summer? Who knows, maybe there's something we don't know but from the outside it just looks like Utd didn't really know what they were doing in the summer and or now and they've made the move because you find yourself 6 points behind Chelsea in the race for the CL spots.