Channel patrols and the limits of tidy war planning

How should Roger Hill's criticism of Channel patrol operations, including the loss of HMCS Athabaskan, be judged?

The 1944-45 Channel operations were still developing techniques later treated as standard, so mistakes and enemy luck have to be part of the judgment.

The answer uses late-war Channel operations to explain why even experienced forces make mistakes while developing new techniques under enemy pressure. Practices treated as standard after the war were still being worked out in 1944-45, so judging the participants only by later doctrine hides the uncertainty they faced. The enemy also has a vote and can exploit errors or simply get lucky. Threat matrices and mathematical models can organize thinking, but they cannot guarantee that an opponent shares the same assumptions or that every capability is understood. The larger lesson is that command still requires risk-taking when plans meet unknown unknowns.