Right now there's no question that they deserve to be called idiots. What's happening now was easily preventable and shouldn't have ever happened under any circumstances.
It's actually
fucking amazing that this is first MAJOR bug in 4 years.
, as all critics ignore because they are clueless and it invalidates their criticism,
the bug isn't in bitcoin at all! It is in some versions of BDB on some platforms. The developers wisely chose a better database for 0.8, but unfortunately the bug manifested itself in a bad way (it could have been worse, e.g. if the bug in BDB made remote code execution or altering old blocks possible) before almost all nodes had upgraded.
I've seen at least one thread claiming that it's not a bug in BDB as much as a misconfiguration.