I don't think they made especially stupid decisions, given where they are in the mess. They haven't figured out that people are the real danger. It makes sense for them. But, it doesn't help the pacing of the show.
Honestly, I think The Walking Dead may have killed off the zombie genre. It's done it so well, so thorougly, and so far past the initial outbreak, that the audience can't feel for characters that aren't battle-hardened. So far, this show is pretty much a standard pre-TWD zombie movie ... couple of nameless nobodies get trapped and periodically attacked by a dead guy or two. But, the audience has changed. The audience is essentially part of Rick's crew. We've seen it all, we've been through the blood, the guts, the attacks, the Governor, the cannibals, etc. We're a solid 4-years farther into this than the characters on FTWD. Zombies aren't scary anymore -- man-up, knife 'em in the eyeball, and move on. But, this show is still trying to sell zombie jump-scares to people it's sister show has taken to hell and back. It doesn't work.
I don't think FTWD is bad. They've tread some new ground with the military safe zone, the yacht, water zombies, and potential pirates. But, it's still pretty standard Romero schlock -- with a few trapped know-nothings panicked at a couple of zombies -- rather than something with characters as far developed and battle-hardened as TWD. The difference between TWD and FTWD is, the audience isn't with the survivors anymore. We're past them.
Somebody said "there's no Rick, Daryl or Carol" in the FTWD crew. That's true. But, 7 episodes into TWD, there wasn't a Rick, Daryl or Carol in that one either. Daryl was a racist nobody. Carol was a weakling battered wife. And Rick ran off into the woods by himself chasing after a little girl ... for like 10-straight-episodes. They were no smarter, or grittier than these guys are. But, we weren't either, so we were with the characters. Now, we're smarter than the characters we're supposed to identify with. We're battle-hardened ... and they end up looking like idiots for decisions that might've seemed completely reasonable to us 8-years ago.
SnakeDoc
Very well said. That's part of what makes this crew do stupid things all the more frustrating. The audience has already gone through all this with the previous show. Now you're asking them to do it again, to "figure out" the rules of the apocalypse again, to learn the rules of the zombies again.
