Yea I'd agree with all of this. It could very easily come from human negligence on the maintenance side, but I doubt it came from the USCG not flagging something. And if there were corners cut, it was either to keep things cheap or out of simple laziness. Whether that came from the crew or from the maintenance yard (the ship recently went under maintenance) will be determined by the coming investigation. But I doubt very much it's from any shortcomings via the USCG.

Tugs are a good idea and the US Navy routinely uses 1-3 tugs to get ships in and out of their pier operations even with bridge crews that are more than triple the number of manning that commercial ships use and even in ports that don't have bridges traversing the entry/exit channels.