That's not what Rogue One addresses at all. The Exhaust port never comes up. Erso put a flaw in the reactor, so a small explosion at the reactor would cause a chain reaction. He never addresses how to set of the explosion there. The plans are needed to show the rebels exactly where in the base the reactor is. How they decide to blow it up is solely in Episode 4. A rebel commando strike force could have done it from the inside, theoretically.
This.
A lot of former Marvel talent jumped ship to DC in the 1980s too, and that had a big effect on the way DC characters were written in that period.
DC already changed the way many of its characters were written in the late 1960s and into the following decade (shedding Silver Age buffoonery, much to the delight of readers and creatives alike) with O'Neil, Robbins, Jack Miller, Drake, Fleisher, Carley, et al., evolving many DC superheroes with characterization just as mature as anything at Marvel of the same period.