Do any of these commenters have experience designing small "helicopter" "drone" avionics systems using off-the-shelf hardware, as in Ingenuity? For instance, you mention "aerospace grade" inertial sensors, yet Ingenuity apparently uses COTS components in that role^[1].
There are smart people on HN, but unless they have actual professional experience designing similar vehicles, I'm inclined to give the JPL folks the benefit of the doubt. It's also worth considering that they are the only team that has ever flown such a vehicle on another planet, which imposes constraints that even other experts may not be familiar with; that they were working with a limited budget, and making heavy use of existing open-source code; and that, generally speaking, we weren't in the room.
On the other hand, maybe they really are incompetents whose avionics system is "designed wrong", and who do need these things explained to them so that they can learn faster, as the commenter you linked so delightfully put it. In that view, I guess their groundbreaking achievement is probably more dumb luck than anything else--maybe JPL should do some firing and hiring so that things don't turn out worse next time!
^[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/aerospace/robotic-explor...
