Trading down when the roster is loaded, drafting players at positions that are already well-stocked....has Ted Thompson gone insane? Nah, he's just doing pretty much the same thing he does every year.
Here's why: Lesser GM's live in a fantasy world where every player they draft fills a niche on the roster, and everything is all nice and tidy. Ted, on the other hand, is one of those GM's who is fully aware of the fact that, no matter how good your scouting department is, the draft is a crapshoot. Therefore, your plan needs to be more open-ended.
Even the highest picks are famous for being iffy propositions in most cases, and the lower you get in the draft, the more uncertainty there is about whether the players are going to pan out. So you pick the best prospect available, using need as a tiebreaker, trading down when you know you can still get a player you've had your eye on and trading up when you have a chance to steal a player out from under somebody else.
As a fan, I like it when Ted's picks correlate as closely as possible with the team's needs, because that means the draft fell our way. This year, that lasted all of two rounds. Things got a little weird after that, with an RB in the third round and two TE's later. But these guys will all go into the mix along with the all-important undrafted free agent signings (can anyone say Sam Shields? or how about Frank Zombo?) and because of injuries and other unexpected events, you never know how it's going to shake out. Ted is just playing the odds. It's a good thing he doesn't go to Las Vegas. He would clean those bastards out.