This man rocks up and dumps Shelby on the Enterprise, praises her work, drops some weird creepy line about fancying her, then buggers off.
Then Picard's captured and all his Starfleet knowledge is property of Borg. Shelby warns Hanson about this and Hanson... goes off on one about how Picard ran a marathon that one time and therefore she's wrong? And no one calls him out on this?
I kinda get why Sisko "blamed Picard" for what happened – the writers wanted to thematically separate DS9 from TNG early so they put Sisko at odds with Picard and used Picard as the shorthand for everything 'wrong' with Starfleet. But in universe it doesn't really make sense to me – it's Hanson's fault and he should've been chucked under the bus for it.
Mup from the future
Hanson joins a long list of admirals in Trek who arrive at the top of an episode to dump an exposition, and pop back later to do some mild antagonism and spice up the third act. Hanson is perhaps the most extreme exmaple of this, being responsible for a huge body count after explicitly ignoring advice from Shelby, who was established as the expert he trusted. But, why?
The core of 'Best of Both Worlds' is that the Borg are powerful and Picard has been captured. Shelby is doing an excellent job exposing Riker as the shouty bearded child that he is so you have more than enough conflict to fill the remaining runtime. The episode doesn't need this beat with Hanson, and he may have better contributed to the story by following Shelby's advice, changing strategy, and failing anyway, since that does a better job of delivering the "Borg + Picard = you're fucked" message. And yet, the start of the second half completely borks the pacing, grinding the story to a halt as Hanson mopes and mulls over whatever. His stupid conclusion is silently accepted by our heroes and he's dead a few scenes later. The idea that the fleet's destruction was perhaps preventable is left on the table, never to be touched again.
Quick aside: it really is odd that Hanson is never mentioned again, given how important Wolf 359 appears to be in the canon. The DS9 pilot is all over it, and a bit part of Sisko's arc is the blame he puts on Starfleet for it. Voyager features multiple Borg assimilated at Wolf 359, and none of them have anything to say about the event. The 'First Contact' film essentially reboots the battle, and even includes another Admiral making silly decisions: like Hanson, he's dead two scenes later and no one mentions him or his cockup again.
Quick 'quick aside' aside: the "assimilated at Wolf 359" Voyager beat happens first in 'Unity' and again three years later in 'Unimatrix Zero'. Both times, the information is utterly redundant, and serves only to make us ask diverting questions like "how?", or "why?", or "when?", even though the only good answer to said questions is "who cares? The writers sure don't". My cynical assumption is that the writers either don't like or don't remember the riveting stock of existing Delta quadrant aliens, and would rather shoehorn in yet another 'boring, angry Klingon' or 'boring, collected human'.
Quick 'quick 'quick aside' aside' aside: I still haven't quite made peace with the fact that Voyager has this incredible premise where there's an intra-Borg dating app and Janeway wants to hijack it for military hiring purposes and the Borg Queen wants to kill all the app's users because she hates love or something, and somehow the episode still finds room for a scene where a Klingon harps on about the honour of dying in battle. The laziness of it is just bewildering.
So, here's my hot take. There's this strange conservative trend where folks are extremely distrustful of civilian authories, but they love police and military forces. Michael Bay films go big on this idea – government types are reliably arrogant and useless and contrasted with down-to-earth army men who can yell and hold a gun real good. I can't help but notice this same contrast drawn between captains and admirals in Trek. Admirals are reliably arrogrant and useless, and captains are doing the right thing when they ignore those admirals and do the "right" thing instead. Kirk advises Picard to reject the admiralty after rejecting it himself, because the captain "can make a difference", and Dax had a whole thing about how she couldn't see Sisko as an admiral because he had to be "in the thick of things" and not "behind some desk".