"Faster, better, cheaper" was a basically good space policy

The "faster better cheaper" idea probably suffered (I guess) from two related things :
1) A (not wholly unjustified) belief that "failure is not an option", though in fact failure is part and parcel of research, especially risky research.
2) While missions were relatively cheap, they still required serious levels of money. Certainly, if your $10 million mission explodes this is not as bad as if your $200 million mission dies a fiery death. But who's willing even to risk $10 million ? It's a heck of a lot of money and required time invested to tell people, "well, it might all just go kerblamo, but we'll see".
And a possible third point : the overall savings are hard to compare at the time. Only after a considerable period of implementation can you evaluate which method is more economical. And even if the savings were evident, this might not be terribly comforting if you were working on a project that exploded and all your work was wasted.

The article mentions cubesats at the end, which are cheap enough to dodge this scary-number threshold. I would cautiously add that, thanks to SpaceX's sequence of spectacular first-stage failures (whilst also successfully delivering the payloads to orbit, thus giving the best of both worlds), the mantra of failure as acceptable might be more acceptable. Won't work for manned missions but it might for robotic probes.

In an effort to correct the planetary science community’s impression and memory of FBC, here are some facts that changed my perception of the era.
-The Viking mission to Mars in 1976 cost $1.06 billion in real-year dollars and took 6 years to develop. The Pathfinder team was instructed to send a lander AND rover (Sojourner) to Mars in half the time and 1/14 the budget. They succeeded.
-In fact, the Pathfinder lander cost less than the life detection experiment on Viking ($220 million, inflation-adjusted). The Sojourner rover only cost $25 million.
-Leveraging new CCD detector technology, the Pathfinder team spent $7.4 million to develop a new camera while the Viking team spent $27.3 million (inflation-adjusted) on their 2 cameras (1 for each lander). New CCD detector technology allowed a significant camera mass reduction.
-All 16 FBC missions combined cost less than the Viking missions.
-Cassini required 15 years for development; combined, all 16 FBC missions took 7 years.
-Lunar Prospector, which developed very little new technology yet discovered water ice on the Moon, only cost $63 million.

An obvious counter-argument is that the FBC spacecraft may have been cheap, but they were also a lot less capable than larger spacecraft with many more instruments. True. Cost reduction happens in part by reducing capability, e.g., Pathfinder didn’t have an orbiter, and Viking did. However, FBC missions resulted in more scientific publications (a proxy for science return) per dollar spent than traditionally managed missions (Dillon and Madsen 2015). The ability of the FBC approach to increase the science return from finite funding is a missing yet critical part of the space community’s narrative about the Faster, Better, Cheaper era.

http://www.elizabethafrank.com/colliding-worlds/fbc