Viewed another way, a successful bugfix brings a $2.5B instrument back to life.
And it demonstrates that the design allowed bug fixes while the rover is on another planet. I view this as big success for the engineering. They did a great job. It’s more important to have the ability to fix bugs than avoiding bugs.
Assuming your bug fix mechanism is bug free...
True. That's where a lot of the quality effort should go. Also keep this part as simple as possible.
And then to resume to slightly-above normal heart beats when you remember it was designed for way less time/usage than it actually survives. Guess we'll see if this is the final stone or not, apparently they are trying to get it right again (thinking about that, wonder how it feels to deploy a hotfix to another fucking planet)
Absolutely. But these types of glitches are necessary to learn about real world problems.