If learning is the point then obviously that was a missed opportunity.

If success was the intent, then it's a win.

While challenges are fun, sometimes the requirement is simply to achieve the end goal, with no other point than that.

If your job is to stop terrorists, and that includes hacking into a system and extracting their plans, the "fun" of it isn't the point, only the end goal it's important. Sometimes when we do things like this for fun we forget that someone else out there absolutely needs to achieve the result and doesn't care how it's achieved.

It's the part of penetration testing some people miss. (It's not generally a fun job, almost everyone I know that did it got out as soon as possible. They weren't solving problems, they just running audit scripts and generating reports.)