About this Kevin Lowe business

Not that I'm trying to defend Kevin Lowe here or anything but I'm tired of reading everyone's complaints about how he's the most evil bastard in the world for giving Vanek an offer sheet. The man didn't do anything illegal. He took advantage of an existing clause in the CBA, a clause that I presume was put in there in order to be used. If you're going to have all this stigma attatched to it then why even bother having Restricted Freee Agency in the first place?

Isn't this whole process dangerously close to collusion? If a bunch of NHL(or say baseball....) owners got together and verbally agreed to limit the offers made to each other's players in order to keep salaries down they'd be in a lot of legal trouble. How different is that from the current situation where the league's GM's are essentially agreeing not to take advantage of a clause in the CBA that would probably drive up player salaries?