Heh.
I think my thoughts are player-agency related as well, but in the other way. If the mission objectives are so easy that it's basically impossible to fail, is there room for a player to make a difference? You get your pay, your level ups, the overall war is won..
I mean, seriously, I did everything I could to get killed, and nobody would kill me. I don't think there should be any wonder as to why I feel the game is very easy, and there are basically no consequences to taking any action.
Especially with seeing things like the override button come off with no penalty. It turned an extremely dangerous situation into a win, and not through good play or doing anything special. Just by pushing a button, essentially.
At the end of the day, the team gets to fly away from a devastated once-friendly colony, with one dead, and almost zero information on what actually happened, other than confirming that it was a UWM counter-attack. But when it comes to the war, this will be considered a success, despite being easy enough that a single drone could have done everything the players did, by going down, taking a sample, riding an elevator down, and then dying, followed by Steve bombarding the colony from orbit.
The only guy who could have botched that mission harder was Xan, but you win, because you didn't Xan it up.
Really, it's a failure from a neutral point of view. From the point of view of a special-forces team, it's a bad failure, as it's a failure, the team is down a man, you lost plenty of sods, and the Sword wasted it's time shipping the elite team around for a job that could have been done by a drone. I'll be happy if you can call it one.