Whether Hoagland had an undergraduate astronomy degree or not, there's no need to deny he's reasonably intelligent, has spent considerable time on and done some work to popularize astronomy, and even had some participation in the Pioneer plaque.

The problem is that he inflates his resume, claims original credit for ideas not his own (plaque, Europa ice), and the ideas for which he deserves original credit (Mars "city", Pyramid connections, Mars junkyards, etc.) are raving works of hallucination, wishful thinking, numerology, and conspiracy. He's also abrasive and arrogant without the chops to back it up.

I'm just saying, we don't have to talk down what he did accomplish before he went completely off the deep end.