A better analogy to the conspiracy line of reasoning would be, "My truck is bigger than your truck, therefore your truck can't haul an upright piano." The conclusion is is simply a non sequitur. The question is whether the piano fits the truck, not whether the truck is as big as another truck.
While Fazor's analogy may fray at the edges, the core is rock solid. You can't look at irrelevant measurements of capacity and pretend they're meaningful. One of those irrelevant measures is whether old technology matches up to knew.
More insidious are the qualitative changes that bear on a question. We use digital computation today for tasks that were previously accomplished by much different kinds of technologies before. You can't limit your thinking of how to solve those problems to the kind of solution that's currently in vogue. There's a difference between the expedience of a solution and its possibility.
Clockmaking first used mechanical potential energy in the form of springs under strain or suspended weights. That energy is expressed through an escapement to a rotating shaft. the shaft drives a precisely coordinated gear train that provides readouts in hours, minutes, and seconds. A purely mechanical solution to clock-based timekeeping exists. However, the problem of accurate rotational velocity is difficult to achieve with ordinary escapements. Thus as soon as it was possible, AC or DC synchronous motors replaced the weights and escapements and provided a completely different technology for achieving precision rotational power. The motor still drives the same precision-milled gear train. Nowadays timekeeping is most commonly done with an integrated circuit that measures the vibratory response in quartz to an electrical input. Readout is by counters attached to electrical pins. One can still obtain mechanical clock actions. But someone whose experience is only with electrical timekeeping may not know anything about mechanical solutions to the same problem.
Believing that control systems must be sophisticated digital systems because that's what prevails to day does not give you appropriate insight into discrete or sequential control systems used from about 1930 to 1960, and upon which much space technology was still based. If you don't know anything about the level of sophistication achieved by that technology, you won't be well positioned to argue what it can and can't do.
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