Your last paragraph appears to be the plan for Piakura.
I would suggest that the downside of that is you may only get 18 months of value out of them before they will then start commanding more money due to their form.
Piakura is signed to 2024, but he could spend next year in reserve grade getting paid top 30 money and not become an NRL starter until 2023... suddenly 2024 rocks around and he's looking for an extension or possibly looking to make some money (basically what happened with Fifita).
In the case of Burton there was heavy pressure on the Panthers to release him early so in that sense they would've basically got zero value out of a promising junior that they brought all the way through.
It makes it seriously hard to develop and retain talent.
The alternative is you sit and hang back like the roosters until you have a position that needs filling and then cherry pick guys that you want until you land on something that works.
In like the last 5-7yrs they've poached or cherry picked Nikorima, Hastings, Keary, Cronk, Flanagan and Walker... and apparently they also went after Dearden before he re-signed with us, which was lucky for him, because he probably would've been at centrelink by now if he went there.