Especially this season. £23m to be much worse than McLeish, jesus h christ.
I still think you're being far too harsh and missing the bigger picture. Look at the players that played some part last season that haven't for some reason or another been utilised by Lambert this season:
Hutton, Warnock, Collins, Cuellar, Petrov, Gardner, Heskey.
After what Hutton said in September about the reason he was being frozen out was to do with finances and nothing to do with his footballing ability then I think it's a pretty logical theory to assume he wasn't the only player this applied to. I'd wager Warnock, Collins and the out of contract Heskey and Cuellar were the same. Losing all of these including our captain and best central midfielder by a mile in Petrov his has clearly left us with a fairly big hole to plug in the squad to which we spent as you say roughly £23m addressing. When you consider that a fair chunk of these players formed part of the side that finished 6th then £23m on 8 players isn't really going to rectify this is it? It would sit more with the plan that we've already been told several times that the club is building for the future with younger players on lower wages. Whether this is the correct strategy in the current climate I would probably question but consistently slagging the manager as if he inherited a decent squad and spent £23m going nowhere seems a very simplistic view in my opinion. His hands have been tied by the finances, but he has arguably performed a solid job in getting some good talent in with the money available and players which are probably yet to reach their full potential.
Regardless of what happened in the semi final we did actually reach the latter stages of the League cup which we didn't do under TSM (and beat 2 Premier league sides away on the way) and we're one place below where we finished last season. Taking into account the change in the squad and the money we've used to replace good players I think you can make a pretty good case for Lambert actually doing a fairly decent job.