Some seem to not understand that Brawn GP was not in a good shape before Mercedes took over, due to having to layoff people to withstand the budget and be able to bring home the Championships. It's why Jenson and Rubens already had signed for McLaren and Williams before Mercedes had taken over, and because they were down on key staff, they transitioned to building a good factory team. It takes around 3 years for a team building to get competitive, and it was the the same for Merc (Started 2010, first win 2012, winning regularly 2013, Champions 2014).
Back to Ferrari, I believe everyone has a right to feel slightly pessimistic about their chances this year. In terms of hyping that "the following year is gonna be our year!", this time last year was the peak. Everyone thought they would take it to Merc this year. And they didn't. That's always been their culture, and when they don't achieve it they find others to blame for the shortcomings. I don't think Marchionne is as good of a boss as Luca was, and he wasn't exactly the best motivator either. It just seems that Sergio and Ferrari have started to fall into the same trap that Luca, Stefano and Ferrari did back in 2012-2014, and their results suffered because of it.
I think it's a bit hard to compare what Sebastian has done/is doing for Ferrari to what Schumacher did. What Michael did was essentially like if when Sebastian had left Red Bull, he took Adrian Newey and Christian Horner with him to Ferrari. You may be great as a driver, but if you don't have the best engineers and guys building the car, you get nowhere. That's why Michael took Rory and Ross, because they were the best you could have gotten at the time apart from Adrian Newey. Vettel brought no one from Red Bull and with the way Ferrari go through engineers currently, I dare say it is hard for them to convince top engineers like Paddy Lowe to join, because they will feel like as soon as it doesn't work out they will be thrown out the door.
2017 will be very interesting...