I’m surprised and pleased they succeeded on the third (rather than fourth) try, and I’m not counting the hop tests which all failed rather nicely. :^) Still too many engines imho, but I stopped being skeptical when they successfully launched Falcon 1 on the fourth try.
The Booster can have up to 7 engines fail and still make orbit with payload.
If one of the Saturn V engines failed the mission would have failed. So less is not necessarily better.