Ask HN: The Starliner spacecraft issues, how harrowing for the astronauts?

IANAA...but Starliner's problematic history was no secret when these two astronauts signed up for this flight. From a quick skim of Wikipedia, both came from the US Navy - where both were test pilots, with (in his case) plenty of combat experience to boot.

Both have previously been to the ISS multiple times, via multiple launch vehicles.

Guess: By these astronauts' standards, this flight seems quite low-risk.

They did not manually pilot the docking. They demonstrated manual piloting outside the 200m keepout sphere. This was a planned test but they wound up counting manual testing the problematic thrusters as that test.

The previous Starliner flight that actually docked with the ISS had two thrusters out as well so this was not totally unexpected.

Probably more concerning than harrowing. Remember that those astronauts are experienced test and combat pilots; well trained. They're used to things going wrong and reacting to them (I'd hope) calmly and methodically.