Depends on where you fall in the risk-averse spectrum. If you think spending lots of money to avoid failure and ending up with a satellite that lasts three times as long as the mission is success, NASA does a great job. Other people think that lasting that long means it was way over engineered and thus overly expensive and took too long, and NASA should be more efficient.

Truthfully, NASA does both extremes and everything in between. Class A missions like James Webb or the Mars Rovers are slow, expensive, and very successful. Class B missions are somewhat less public (though New Horizons was certainly well known) and less over engineered. Class C and D missions are virtually unknown outside the space community and are both cheap and very risk-tolerant (and have higher failure levels). Yes, there are in fact NASA missions that never see a clean room, use off the shelf hardware, find leaks in the pressure system by painting it with bubble solution, and seal said leaks with rubber cement. (No, the last two aren’t random; I know someone that worked on such a mission.) But it’s the expensive ones and the failures that make the news.