As it happened, they were merely delaying the inevitable. Despite Watford's best efforts to keep hold of Marco Silva in November amid interest from Everton, the Portuguese coach eventually arrived at Goodison Park on Thursday as the Merseyside club's new manager; therein ending the protracted, six-month long saga.
Silva had always been Everton major shareholder Farhad Moshiri's man - even if his arrival came via a Sam Allardyce-shaped detour - but it's also true that the Portuguese crucially ticks a lot of boxes for new director of football, Marcel Brands, who himself takes the reins in L4 on Friday.
“I think one of the most important things is that he is a guy who wants to play attractive football, attacking football and also wants to work in the structure we have in our mind with Everton," Brands said on Thursday. "He is also a guy who has proved already that he wants to work with young players, make them better, and he has performed very well with teams that he has worked with. He is a very good coach for Everton."
In last week citing the need for a young and dynamic coach to drag Everton into the post-Allardyce era, Dutchman Brands had simultaneously created a job specification tailor-made for Silva and established a philosophical link between the two.
Question marks remain over the latter's ability to not just see a project through but also convert patches of form into tangible success, however, what appealed most was the former Hull manager's ability to serve as a reformative influence on the training ground. And so, with wide-scale change a necessity at Goodison and managers such as Diego Simeone out of reach, the Brands and Silva combination seems like the perfect match for Everton at this stage in the club's development.
Together, the pair have been tasked with righting the considerable wrongs of a season that spiralled so horribly out of control on and off the pitch. Given the extent of the regression, the gaping holes in the playing squad and vast amounts of money wasted in previous transfer windows, that will a considerable hurdle in itself.
But in moving away from the stagnant, malfunctioning model of Allardyce as manager and Steve Walsh as director of football, Everton have taken the first bold steps towards a brighter future. Lessons, seemingly, have been learned by those high up at the club; substantial obstacles swiftly identified and then overcome in the two weeks since the season finished, constituting significant progress for a club that had previously appeared to be drifting aimlessly.
Regardless of Silva's appointment, the key cog in the new setup will be Marcel Brands as the man who sits at the top of the hierarchical tree. Whereas predecessor Steve Walsh functioned predominantly as a chief scout, former PSV chief Brands has a proven record of successfully transforming all aspects of a club. He will be given the chance to do the same at Goodison Park; shaping the long-term trajectory of an outfit that has too often made crucial decisions on a whim. The hope now is that strategic errors such as the ones witnessed over the past 24 months become a distant memory.
Below him, Everton now have a modern manager who has drawn widespread adulation from his past charges. Popular, charismatic and a seminal influence on the training ground, Marco Silva will be expected to liaise with Brands to not only make gains among the current crop of players, but also rekindle the dormant relationship between team and fanbase largely through an exciting brand of attacking football.
Some, if not all, of the tools needed are already at his disposal. Yet while record signing Gylfi Sigurdsson, promising winger Ademola Lookman and Theo Walcott serve as a decent starting point for Silva's refashioned Everton, elsewhere there remains a great deal of reconstructive surgery to do on the spine of a side that was all too often fragile when it really mattered last season.
With the World Cup just two weeks away, and the window relatively short after that, Brands and Silva face an uphill task in getting every piece in place for the start of the 2018-19 campaign. And so patience will be required from just about all concerned as a transitional setup takes its first baby steps.
It may take time to fully turn things around, but at long last it seems as though Everton are learning from past mistakes. Brands and Silva represent the start of something new and different, instead of the old tried and tested model of failure. And that, at the very least, means optimism once again springs eternal on the blue half of Merseyside.
