They didn't come back, though. It's still a success in the sense that it was a test mission and determining there was a problem is valuable, but Starliner is not ready
Considering both recent US vehicle losses have been on re-entry, I feel NASA is vindicated on being ultra-conservative around that stage.
So anomalies that might be acceptable during ascent would be unacceptable during decent.
Personally? I'm glad Boeing launched.
I wish they were perfect technically, but I also realize that an infinite amount of time and money doesn't protect against unknown-unknowns.
IMHO, they should be operating more like SpaceX (and the earlier days of the US space program) -- using calculated risk and engineering to decide when it's reasonable to do an inherently risky thing, when doing so is needed to move the entire program forward.
