>It is astoundingly disingenuous to act like these things are comparable.

Why aren't they comparable? In both cases, it's Mozilla pushing code to the end user. There's a different process behind both but calling one a frontdoor and one a backdoor seems apt to me.

>and which can make such large scale errors as evicting all extensions

Normandy was not used to disable all extensions. It was caused by a certificate expiration error completely independently. Normandy is being used instead to work around the error until a more permanent fix can be issued.

Because regular auto-updates are easy to understand and turn on/off. Normandy is clearly extremely hard for many users to understand, enabled by default, and hard to disable.