Keith mate, do you know where we are both financially and on the pitch?? I'd say not, financially neither am I, but I think that I grasp our current model better than you. We cannot afford the wages of top players, nor can we afford the transfer fees and we can't just force through transfers for players who don't want to come. For all your protestations, Champions League football does draw a different calibre of player, not to mention the extra revenue we could use to buy said players, but again we cannot sustain those players' wages without a sustainable model. If we go out and spend £70-80 million net in one season and pay 4-5 players in excess of £150k we will start to struggle long term without constant financial backing.
Two of your examples are players who didn't want to come. Martial signed a new deal with Monaco (whose manager actually said he didn't want to lose the player). It's almost like the Kane to Man UTD situation, they want him, but he doesn't want to go and his manager wants to keep him. Can you imagine the fallout if we had sold Kane behind the managers back? Schneiderlin again made us wait. He always wanted Champions League football and he made it clear that we were not his first choice. If reports are to be believed we had the cash to buy him, it was simply a case of us being made to wait by the player. You could argue that that move may have affected us on a larger scale as we waited around longer than we probably should have.
We cannot compete financially with the big boys. We have to wait for them to do their shopping and go home before we make our bids, because they will gazump us if we bid for something they want. Even if they aren't serious, they can fake interest to get the selling club to up the price by £5-10 million, draw out talks and float ideas into the players head until that player has eyes for only one club and one set of wages. We have to wait, because at the end of the day there are some players out there who could play for the clubs above us. They know it and we know it but when we come around towards the end of the window, they are far more likely to say yes knowing that we are their best choice than to sit around whilst their agent flirts with other clubs trying to push them into making a move. I'd rather wait til later on and get the better quality players for affordable wages than spend stupid money and bankrupt the club.