Cost-cutting doesn't always cut costs.
There's nothing wrong with the "Faster, better, cheaper" paradigm per se; part of the cost of FBC is the acceptance of some failures. One should become concerned when the failure rate begins to exceed a reasonable amount -- in planetary exploration, say, greater than 20% or so.
One must remember the historical context for FBC -- in the 1980's, we had billion-dollar missions that failed (seemingly every time you turned around), not because of ill-luck as this one appears to be, but because of institutionalized incompetence (e.g., Hubble mirror flaw; the Galileo high-gain antenna). The thought was that by making missions "smaller" (focused missions with a few, carefully chosen instruments and no "Christmas tree"-ing of spacecraft with every instrument under the sun) and making them "faster" (small, lean organizations that flew missions, drawing board to data return, within ~3 years, as opposed to the decade-scale, mega-missions of the '80s), you made them "better" -- because you actually got data and science, instead of welfare for the engineering infrastructure of JPL.
FBC works. That was shown in the Clementine, Lunar Prospector, NEAR, and Pathfinder missions. Even if CONTOUR is lost, the management philosophy it was designed and built under has not been "discredited."
With NASA throwing that kind of cash at the smallest, least significant projects, it is easy to see why no one has any interest in commercial space ventures. Why would they want to deal with people trying to make money with NASA dumping truckloads of cash at the drop of a hat.