The Patriots certainly value production, intelligence, and a good mentality, but your memory is having some issues here. Just last year, Dugger, Uche, and Keene were physical freaks. Vollmer and Solder were physical freaks with meh tape (especially in Vollmer's case). Chandler Jones had like 4 sacks his last year in college. Gronk and Ras-I Dowling were physical marvels with injury history. And some of their best picks, unsurprisingly, were guys like Devin McCourty and Joe Thuney who were great athletes and had the kind of personality / production stuff they like.
You're not the only person I hear making arguments like this, but I think it is wrong. The one thing I will say is they tend to value size more than most teams and value straight-line speed a little less, though this does vary by position.
Chubb has turned out to be the better pro, but I don't think that's because Michel had less upside. They ran basically the same 40 time. Michel was more of the big-play threat at Georgia. I think he left his best football in Athens though.
This is pretty narrowly focused on 40 time. Harry has average speed (4.53) but he's huge and he jumped out the gym.
RAS has him like an 85th percentile athlete. Harry's a lot slower than than Metcalf but he's not much slower than Deebo (4.48) or A.J. Brown (4.49). He just sucks at the technical aspects of the position. I think his long speed would be fine if he could get off the line of scrimmage worth a damn.
FWIW Harry is an aberration among their highly-drafted WRs; almost all the other receivers they've taken in the first three rounds were 4.45 guys who had crappy production in college (Bethel Johnson, Taylor Price, Aaron Dobson, etc.); IOW, the kind of high-upside swings you're advocating for. Obviously, they didn't work out any better.
Statistically this was not a particularly good group of athletes, to be honest.