Crazy sometimes human could be. But let us celebrate instead.

I celebrate the achievement just fine, it’s the horrible estimate that is shoved in my face constantly I have issues with. It represents a dumbing down of science for the masses that is just getting worse year after year that I resent. The rover isn’t good enough as is, we are told to be impressed by a nearly 50-fold wrong estimate that is all anyone knows about the rover. I knew it would be one of the top comments on this post. As a scientist I appreciate precision and good science, not hero worship and bureaucratic PR estimates.

Is it not acceptable that they were conservative in their predictions about the effects of Martian dust? I imagine they didn't have a whole lot of data points to inform their estimate.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but if you care about accuracy, you shouldn't also conflate an engineering goal with an estimation. I couldn't find the original estimation, but considering the unknowns we're talking about and the sunk costs, surely a 4-8x safety margin (1-2 years estimation) is not unreasonable. So we're at most talking about a 15-fold wrong estimation, not 50.