I've been quite busy lately, so perhaps I missed it. I don't recall seeing anyone bad mouth mission controllers.

I used to be a mission controller (the title was Planner Analyst) for DSCS-III communications satellites, so I know something about this topic. Those guys at places like JPL and their counterparts elsewhere are incredible. A big part of my job was ensuring the health of my satellites. Those people at JPL have worked miracles in the past and no doubt will continue to do so in the future.

One of the most impressive JPL missions was Voyager. That system was designed for the light levels at Saturn, so when they were getting ready for the Uranus enounter, they knew they'd need to do some long duration time exposures to get good pictures. Someone realized that starting and stopping the tape cassette used for data storage imparted a small angular rotation to Viking, so they reprogrammed it to automatically fire very brief thruster pulses to compensate. Slick! I also read of them having to reprogram one of the Vikings just hours before a planetary encounter when a problem hit the RAM used to store video images. In a matter of hours, they developed a plan (use another portion of RAM to hold the images), wrote the code, tested it, uplinked it, and got the shots.