Something that is almost always overlooked is Broughton's job is NOT Chief Scout. He isn't in charge of finding players. To quote him:
“It is different at every club and has to be context specific. At Blackburn Rovers the role of Director of Football is to oversee the sporting side of the Club including the six departments: First Team, Academy, Player Recruitment, Analysis, Performance and Medical."
That's quite a lot of areas to oversee at once. I'm sure our Head of Recruitment/Chief Scout, with the other scouts, does the vast majority of busy work identifying players and drawing up lists based on what budget and priorities are given to them. Budgets which have changed repeatedly and made this part of matters very difficult to conduct. I'd expect Broughton's roles in the recruitment process to involve deciding (with the manager) who from the narrowed down lists they still want pursue, and then conducting the negotiations (again very difficult with the rug constantly pulled from under you). But his role is never going to involve personally finding gems, short of being recommended someone by whatever contacts he has, and if the lists presented to him are crap, there might be no gems on them, or only polished ones we can't afford.
All this, combined with the fact the brief is now to find cheap, young, unpolished gems who will take time to polish so can't exactly be judged as failures or successes within 9 months or so, inclines me towards giving him more time before I decide if he's crap or not, though I do have some issues with him. He needs to be replacing scouting staff who aren't up to the task, I'm sure that would come under his remit, but, especially since we are always reluctant to pay staff off and may struggle to afford better staff, he will need to give it time to see if those players develop in order to judge the people who suggested them.