Think the truth lies somewhere in between the extremes. I don't buy the saved-the-club bit. We weren't going to get relegated; the results under RDM would have improved, and we could well have ended up higher than we did under Bruce that season, although I think making the playoffs probably wasn't going to happen.
What he did do was identify the players who really didn't want to be here and shipped them out, at quite useful prices. In doing so he cleaned the club of much of the underlying toxic atmosphere, which payed dividends later on. In general, the players he signed over the two years were good buys, good enough that it was astonishing we didn't do better.
Against that there was the lack of structure to what he was trying to do and hence many of the good buys were wasted; some were benched almost as soon as they arrived. Things never really clicked; there was the odd good performance, but they were the exceptions, there was the odd good run, but when one stopped it wasn't just a blip, it was followed by a bad run. We weren't going anywhere, we weren't building something for the future, we became mired in very strange team selections and the team looking lost on the field; it wasn't good enough.