I think a lot of the debate is due to attitude and "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". Maybe even jealousy?
Anyway, this guy did the right thing. Pulling the chute minimised energy from his crash, gave people on the ground forewarning of his arrival, and not a single person was hurt. How can one argue with this? Power off landing, bang, there goes a house as the options are bad, loss of control - high speed impact into a school playground....who knows what the outcome would have been, and NO ONE would have known before the incident. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and just maybe the pilot would have done things differently next time, but that is learning.
Anyway we still don't know why the accident happened. if it was loss of control in IMC then quite probably the chute saved a lot of lives. You can argue whether or not he should have been there, but that wouldn't have been much good to those that had been killed so I don't know why we bother arguing about stuff like this.