I think the problem is that the Flames have on balance reached their peak (given ages of players; sure, some should improve further, but others will now surely regress) and there is absolutely nothing coming from the farm, except filler (barring unforeseen evolutionary jumps), and that peak is a decent NHL team. Last season the Flames were surely as good as the Blues, but we peaked in December and they peaked in May.
The Blues just happened to find a goalie in their system to address their main weakness, while we were unable to tweak our team to push it over the top. The NHL, because of the cap, is basically 20-some average teams, plus a few really good teams and a few really bad teams. The Flames are right in the fat part of the curve, maybe even on the positive slope, and sometimes lightning strikes and an average team can win all the flips (to use a poker term) - it happened last year, it happened in 2006 and it happened in 1993 if you really want to reach back. It almost happened in 2004. If the owners are satisfied with that, there is not really a whole lot we can do.
I think the time to win was last year. But because of Brouwer, Neal and Stone we couldn't do anything. There is no help in the pipeline - just replacement players. So, what should we do? To give him credit, Treliving really tried to push this thing over the line, but his own FA f***-ups were his undoing, and he could not overcome them. Hamonic was a costly mistake that robbed the future and he MUST NOT be signed to an extension - that will be another Stone. There is no way anyone in the organization will sign up for a teardown, so I think the only thing that can be done is to try to re-tool on the fly - shed as much as possible to clear up space and gather draft picks and hope that you can use the flexibility for a re-load and another go.