That's the issue. No one there, Including the audience, can actually say that his "how" it should be done wasn't also "what" needed to be done, given the time sensitive conditions & precarious variables. That's WHY there's a chain of command.
And
Jellico was the one who flouted the chain-of-command by dangerously and arrogantly assuming that he knew how to get the best out of a ship and crew that he had
zero practical experience with and
no interest in learning.
They don't always get the luxury of getting to know why. They should know that without having to be handheld about it.
Being given the opportunity to present their case and have it heard isn't "being handheld" it's being treated like competent professionals not slaves.
So he did, unlike Riker, who kept pushing, & undermining authority, & Troi egging him on about it, until it went too far.
Riker kept "pushing" because he could see that Jellico was acting extremely unprofessionally in ways that IRL could get a commanding officer
court-martialled if someone went wrong, and endangering the ship and crew and potentially the mission in the process.
Your comparison to Picard in the finale isn't entirely relevant IMHO, because even though they didn't know him, & were as of yet unsure of his ways, he DID know them, intimately. He knew the right things to say, to sway them. Jellico doesn't know any of those people, or WTF they'd personally respond to.
Except it is relevant, because a key part of the problem is that Jellico didn't
want to know the crew, had zero interest in knowing the crew and was content to run them ragged under conditions that would raise eyebrows IRL if he did it at "red alert" during
actual combat for the length of time that he did it.
That's his prerogative as the CO and not a problem. It's the crews job to run the ship as Jellico wants not the other way around.
As noted above, that has limits, particularly outside of combat, which he blew past by the half-way point of the story.
There were hundreds of people on the Enterprise. And if the cobbled together MESS that Delta Shift undoubtedly was had been on duty when combat began, they might have been blasted to ions. So yeah, I think Jellico should have listened to Riker and his section heads, who knew more about the Enterprise than he did.
Yup.
A critical failure. Jellico needlessly withheld information about the mission - putting the mission at risk should Jellico have been incapacitated.
Yup.
When all one has is an axe to grind, every problem starts looking like a tree. In this case: a Riker-shaped tree.
Yeah, but
Jellico is the one who has the "axe to grind" not Riker, who does nothing that wouldn't have been standard for him as XO to DeSoto or Picard (good captains who are secure in their abilities not insecure, micro-managing tyrants like Jellico) up until the confrontation about Picard's status as a PoW which he pushed too hard on, but wasn't wrong to bring up and shouldn't have been relieved of duty (ie suspended and probably fired if not rescinded).
