Those are good points (widespread area of storm, etc.).
But I still think that if the mayor of NO and the governor of LA hadn't been so dysfunctional, many of the major problems would have been averted. The hurricane wasn't really the big problem in NO - it was the flood afterwards. If NO, which has always known that the main threat was flooding, had even had a local evacuation plan in place and operative, just to get people to high ground and spread them out in shelters (we use school gyms as shelters here in Florida), this all would have been different.
So in a sense, the disaster was widespread, but the failure was really only in one very localized area, and not actually from sudden hurricane-type damage (wind and waves) but from a related and slower event that had even been forecast in numerous projections.
I agree with you. However I think the inability of FEMA to function properly means they are not the answer.