There are many reasons someone may feel that a speaker is smug. Some may be warranted and some may not. Since we don't know what happened and can't evaluate whether the parent's friends made a correct assessment or not, with this type of matter, it's best to just ignore it entirely. It has nothing to do with our familiarity with anyone's line of work.
I took that as referring to field expertise. If that wasn't the intent, my mistake.
I get what you're saying, but there isn't video documentation of everything, so at some point you take the words and recollections of others.