Then, apparently the real-time attitude-control feedback loop was delegated to somebody else less experienced. Navigation is a wholly different responsibility that may happen to rely on input from some of the same hardware.

On the other hand, scientists are often not as good at design as engineers. They are not routinely trained in it, and are expected to deduce it from first principles. (If you have seen code written by scientists, you will know what I mean.) When they err, it is typically by assuming that theory and practice are the same.