That's a good reason not to be sympathetic to them in particular. I guess you could say I'm sympathetic to some degree to the problem they were presented, but it was definitely of their own creation, so they shouldn't get a pass.

I mean, it's easy to think you're doing well because you got lucky in personnel and timing for how things went, but maybe have a bit more introspection before writing a book about it and how good your ideas were (there's a lot of non-fiction that could be said about...).