While I don't disagree with your characterization of the criticism, it was more complex than just "people within the scientific community were critical and people outside thought they did the right thing in opening up the data and methodology to criticism when they could not identify a problem in the initial troubleshooting."
A large part of the community took a "wait and see" approach that was (obviously) skeptical of the results.
Because of the hype associated with the event, it's not surprising that people would end up resigning whether or not they really did anything wrong. I can't say that I have enough of a background to know if they should have resigned or not, but I certainly wouldn't use the fact that they resigned as conclusive proof that whatever was done wrong was handled incorrectly as opposed to a reasonable error.
A large part of the community took a "wait and see" approach that was (obviously) skeptical of the results.
Because of the hype associated with the event, it's not surprising that people would end up resigning whether or not they really did anything wrong. I can't say that I have enough of a background to know if they should have resigned or not, but I certainly wouldn't use the fact that they resigned as conclusive proof that whatever was done wrong was handled incorrectly as opposed to a reasonable error.