That isn't quite what I said.. I said dead bodies means it's challenging. It could be spread out to mean other kinds of failure as well. It could be from any cause, bad orders, underpowered players, etcetra, and it could be in other forms, such as actual mission failure or permadead players or such.
I mentioned dead bodies because that's the only kind of real failure that exists. A failed mission hardly matters, it's just a missing superartifact or two that you never knew existed in the first place, or a theoretically uncomfortable situation for Steve which he would then solve with no player effort at all. A screwup on the Q'baja diplo mission, for instance, and I think Steve would have murdered the guy and took over the planet anyway. Only loss would have been a couple tokens. Temp dead, which used to make you sit out a mission, doesn't matter, you get patched up and sent out again immediately, no loss.
A significant majority of player casulties were caused by other players, but these days we have plenty of people ready to jump on any inappropriate orders in the OOC thread, 'don't do that' and any players seen to be dangerous have been marginalized, such as Xantalos or U_P.
In the end, the question of 'do the players suck' or 'is the mission hard' is irrelevant, as those are both qualitative statements, and the label is arbritrary, even say the boxes mission with STAN. That had lots of stuff that is little seen, dangerous travel, for instance. Getting down that pit was harder than anything you had to do in the diplo mission. At the end of the day, the only question for me seems to be, 'did you guys get asked to do anything in-game?' and the answer to that is often very independant from how the mission is described to the players.
For instance, Lenglon mentioned a bunch of things from the base cleanup in the diplo mission post-game stuff, but most of the examples aren't too much. If you were packed together, PW wouldn't blow you up with one shot. If you weren't supporting each other, you would have had a turn to rescue each other. If you didn't take care of most of the battlesuits, it would have been another turn's work for Mya and his +3 amp with perfect decomp. If you hadn't protected against rockets, it would have been about 50% chance of missing, 45% chance of no significant damage. And that's assuming you wouldn't have gotten an extra turn thrown in with the missiles 'in flight', so to speak.
The current round is definately more significant, but we're moved from the point of 'don't blow yourselves up' to win, to 'do things that could be done with five 0 mission newbies'. There's a long way to go from there.
And no, I'm not believing that everyone is totally awesome forever. That's the sign of a good GM, but it's statistically impossible. Isn't it 95% of everyone who thinks they're above average, or something like that?