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Ethan Clive Osgoode: "It's easy to confuse actors and "defender of science" claimants with scientists these days."

For a biographical summary on Nye, you might start here.

Nye is reasonably well educated and has worked for many years educating others as:

The Science Guy, as
author of several books on science, as
guest lecturer at Cornell University, as
creator of scientific equipment &
holder of several patents.

In short, Nye is an all-around science-educator kind of guy, certainly not an Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawkins, but clearly a publicly known "defender of science."

Of course, I "get" that you wish to cast vague aspersions on Nye's qualifications and/or character, but they are not really justified.
Rather, Nye's problem, in terms of this particular discussion, is that he was not fully prepared to discuss the issues raised by Ken Ham's invitation to debate if "Creation is a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era."

I say that only because Nye apparently made no favorable impressions on Ham's audience of mostly creationists.
Whatever Nye was trying to sell them, they weren't buying.

In my view, that means Nye wasn't really addressing the issues they care about, in a way they could relate to.
So I consider Nye lost that debate to that audience.
Of course, it's impossible to say if anybody could have a more successful debate, given that it was, after all, Ham's institute filled with Ham's followers.
Doubtless, if Ham had expected a more serious challenge from Nye, he would have selected somebody else to "debate".

Bottom line: the reason Nye could not persuade that audience is because Nye cares everything about science and nothing about religion, whereas the audience cared everything about its religion, and very little about science.
Ham "spoke their language", while Nye had no clue to it.