Well, the grandparent did say "There is no oversight or limitations."

So, yeah. I believe it would please 'em more if there was a court order involved.

Sorry. Sarcasm doesn't come across well: there is a court order, but because Apple decided to not help, they were removed from the oversight chain, hence arguably weakening the oversight.

Note that the FBI got the court order in a hearing to which Apple was not invited. The court gave Apple an opportunity to respond, and it was in the middle of that process when the FBI found another way in.

It's not like the court told Apple "you need to immediately start working on this" and Apple said "no, we refuse".

If the government gets a search warrant and seizes a safe from your home, they don't need the safe-maker's permission to crack it open.

They would if the safe was purely digital, based on vendor-controlled platform DRM that granted the vendor and only the vendor additional access to the safe.

Yes, as long as there was a public, adversarial argument about it, not some classified, logic-bending "memo" from a lawyer, or some one-sided star chamber FISA "court" order.