My point is that the reason we had to pay top dollar for Peppers is because pretty much every other player on our DL was average at best to downright terrible. He was basically brought in as a last-ditch effort to salvage a unit that is the key to Lovie's whole defensive scheme and was floundering badly.
If we had already had three or four good to really good players on that DL, the whole would have been greater than the sum of its parts and a DE of equivalent caliber to that group would have been plenty. Peppers is a phenomenal player, but for all his talent the best he has been able to do is get this DL back to barely average. This is still not a Bears front four that scares anyone, either in pass or run defense. If the rest of the DL had already been up to snuff, such a drastic measure would not have been needed to give as good (if not better) results than we have gotten from adding Peppers.