Things worked out this time, but the cavalier attitude is dangerous. I also work on spacecraft flight software and this kind of contingency is the one you shoul

Things worked out this time, but the cavalier attitude is dangerous. I also work on spacecraft flight software and this kind of contingency is the one you should exercise only in sims. Voyagers are unique hardware that you can't ever service - the correct risk posture here is don't. Some of the risks involved are - we don't have a good model of the flying hardware. The telemetry is extremely limited and engineers who made / understand it are scarce. Current situation of messing up commands is one of the consequences of that. There is a number of faults that are isolated and recovered via software workarounds, any kind of reset could default you in a non functional configuration. This is aging hardware that is slowly deteriorating, severed comms stop your ability to react to the events. The overall risk of permanent contact loss was probably low, but due to all the unknowns the error bars are quite high.