Clearly the mission controllers bear some responsibility, but I disagree with diverting blame from the creators of the PowerPoint.
The PowerPoint displays extremely clouded thinking. The title is: "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration." What the heck does that even mean? An unclear title is a very strong indicator of unclear thinking about the point being made. Further, there is a relatively precise estimate of the size of the foam, and its orders of magnitude larger than the size used for the tests. The slide clearly states that the penetration velocity depends on "volume/mass of the projectile"--i.e. one would expect a much larger projectile to penetrate at a lower speed. So why is the lead message not "we have to try the tests with bigger foam, because we don't have the data we need to reach a proper conclusion?"
Remember, while this is happening, a million other things are going on. The officials have other risks and trade-offs to deal with. In that scenario, one of your jobs as an engineer is to clearly convey your point, and perhaps more importantly, the limitations of your analysis. It's not the job of the decisionmakers to tease that information out of you. Ideally, of course, a decisionmaker faced with unclear messaging will try and get to the bottom. But in a high-pressure scenario, that doesn't always happen. For one thing, how does the official even know which issues need to be run to the ground and which do not? Who was the person who best knew how significant this slide was? The official reading it (who probably saw a hundred other slides in the same meeting), or the person who wrote it?