As I said, his reputation among his peers was probably already established before then. Remember, to us these are just abstract names, but to people in the business, these are people they actually know and work alongside and run in the same circles with. The viewing public with its microscopic attention span only bothers to notice what someone has done recently, but for industry professionals, this would be someone they'd known or been hearing stories about from their peers for a long time. Audiences are quick to damn a creator for a single disappointing work, because they have the luxury of distance and anonymity, but it's different when that creator is a colleague or friend, someone you've worked with in the past and have to keep working with. Besides, insiders know that the occasional failure is just part of the job, that a single project is not a whole career. So if someone's done good work in the past, they won't write them off the first time they fall short, or maybe even the second. More likely they'll just see it as a dry spell or bad luck and let them try again. Hell, if professionals were as quick to write people off as fans are, they'd quickly run out of people to hire. If someone has a consistent run of bad results, that will generally hurt their career, so it may be harder for Buck to get another Marvel gig after two disappointments in a row. But it wouldn't have happened after only one bad result, not unless it had been really egregiously awful or had failed due to gross mismanagement or something.
