I don't disagree with anything you are saying, but you're making the assumption that he's actually going to play with his existing contract even though he has stated he wants a new one. The 18-20 is too expensive for this team given what they need to do already in the next couple of years and the fact that they invested capital in the draft to solve this issue on the cheap. I'm firmly in the camp of right player, right contract. If EDC can make that work somehow, I'm not disputing that Julio would - likely - provide instant impact. But altho some may want to discount the injury and his age, I don't think they can be completely overlooked or devalued to the point you over pay either in salary or draft picks to just get him at all costs. That I disagree with.
In fact, somewhere buried on this thread, I offered the option of trading with ATL before we signed Sammy Watkins and before being spurned by JuJu and others. Problem is now that we have spent money already. If we hadn't, I would be in sign Julio no matter the cost camp.
Again, if I'm a team, I have zero concerns about "what Julio wants" from a contract perspective. He's got $15.3M fully guaranteed this year, which I don't think he could argue is too little, and he has virtually no leverage after that. The leverage only exists when he goes to a new team and plays well, and they need him badly.
While not universal, there aren't many teams in the league that are going to seriously entertain a contract restructure or extension for a player that a) still has 3 years left on his existing deal and b) just signed current deal less than two years ago. Like if I were a GM, I'm not even having 5 seconds of conversation about it. If you hate the deal now, its almost unfathomable that you liked it 18 months ago when you signed it, which means you made the mistake, and now you live with it.
And if he hates it enough to take a stand on it, he can not show up, pay millions in fines, and sit out the season, in which case the team isn't that much worse off than they were before he got there. And if I were the GM and was told he won't play for my team without a new deal, pretty easy reason to not do the trade to begin with.
Frankly, all this back and forth is pretty useless to me. Like its not entirely impossible we would trade for Julio, but all indications everywhere is that the time for that to happen is long in the past. The time to do it was before you used a first round pick on a WR a month ago, and when you potentially had the cap space to do it. If something happens with your roster in the short term that changes that, i.e. Hollywood or Bateman tears an ACL or something, then the situation will be dramatically different. But all this discussion to me about "whether he's valuable enough" or "bargain of contract" and "he's better than anybody we have" and all that stuff really is just totally irrelevant. There's like 50 players in this league, at a minimum, that I'd love to see be a Raven today that would make this team better. And if we just ignore trade compensation, cap impact, etc., we can talk about bringing in those players all day long. But its a waste, because chances are it won't happen.