So you're complaining about NASA going to a capsule design ("reliving Apollo") and saying that SpaceX is better?
Oh. Wait. SpaceX IS using a capsule design. Whoops.
The SRBs are a proven design that have catastrophically failed exactly once in over 120 launches, with two being used in each launch. SpaceX's launcher is on what, one success with two catastrophic failures out of 4 launches now? Basing designs on well-known proven technology is a bad idea, why, again?
Sure the Ares I has issues right now. Guess what? All launchers do at this phase in their development.
I glanced through the last several pages of the Space Flight News forum and did not see any "detailed criticism" of Constellation, much less "pages and pages" of it. Yeah, I may have missed it, but from what I saw, everything the Anti-Constellation crowd says pretty much boils down to one thing: "It's not cool enough." The Pro-Constellation arguments have been much more reasoned out.
Especially given the way the US economy is, we can't afford to fund non-proven systems to the extent that they would need in order to become viable. If only the treasury would throw hundreds of billions of dollars at NASA the way they throw it at financial companies, but that's not going to happen. ($700 billion is nearly 4 times the total cost of the Shuttle program to date)
The cost of a single shuttle launch is enormous (I saw sources between $400-500mil and $1.5 bil per). Going to a simpler system is going to allow more launches in the same budget, and have more left over for those "cool" projects.
I've seen people berating the Constellation system for not being fully reusable(which, in my opinion, fits into the "cool" category). Frankly, reusability is overrated. The amount of damage sustained by a shuttle's tiles on a nominal entry is significant, and is one of the primary reasons that the USSR didn't go forward with the Buran program. In fact, with the Ares I first stage being a (reusable) SRB and the Orion capsule having the possibility to be reusable, it wouldn't surprise me if the Ares I is in fact the most reusable launcher (by mass, if you will) in history.