Whatever their opinions gullible people are such because of ignorance.
As for your work during 30 years it surely gives you an idea of the difficulty given the complexity of the program and this without any CAD, tell us how much time would be required to design advanced missiles without all the gear that is available since 30 years, for the record the first electronic simulators were released during the second half of the 70s, i designed electronic circuitries and i just cant imagine how i would have done without thoses tools.
I have no doubt about your good faith, i m not saying that you are wrong since i wont use my sole opinion as reference, as said i ll check for sources before making any other statement about the decceleration issue and also the interaction between the space craft , earth and the moon, there is no analytical solution in a gravity system implying three corpses, iirc Henri Poincarré solved the problem by discovering that it was a quasi brownian system, read not predictible accurately and chaotic with no convergence.