Kinda, but that’s not the full story. They didn’t realize the foam was physically capable of producing that damage. For one, the deltaV was higher than previous incidents because of when it occurred in the flight profile. And secondly, the foam demonstrated unknown characteristics at those speeds. They didn’t find that out until they tested the case afterwards and, since they couldn’t reproduce the effect, they basically said “let’s turn it up to 11 for shits and giggles and see what happens.” And voilà, the foam suddenly acted in an unexpected way that produced more damage.

It wasn’t really a “beancounter” issue. It came from the fact that we have imperfect models of physical systems and sometimes we encounter issues outside the boundaries of those model assumptions.