From my scan of the 2015 pre-hire threads I would say you are correct. Virtually no one said Ash is the best choice. There was more pro and cons given for Golden, who was also a rumored candidate. People were kind of grasping at what an Ash hire might mean and seemed to be searching for justifications more than listing their preferences for Ash.
Caliknight was definitive, for one... definitively against. I believe he said: "DC with no HC experience? No thank you."
From my survey it just does not seem like people were campaigning to hire Ash... but tried to accept it and give him support once hired. But in the period after he was hired.. and he worked the bowl game rather than reporting to work here? He began to lose people right away. Then he seemed to fair to make progress on a number of fronts.. and right away. In the next year he would lose a lot of support... largely through his own actions and inaction and what he showed us.... and is still showing us. His 4th down punts in 4-down territory.... people do not like this.
This fits my memory of the time, as well.
As for myself, I had low expectations for the hire from the jump. I knew we weren't going to hire a proven HC, or a big name, or whatever - and I knew we weren't going to shell out much money, so we'd still be at the bottom of the conference in HC spending. I felt it was either going to be a G5 HC or a P5 Coordinator with no HC experience - and I didn't have a dog in the fight. There was no one I was really sold on or really excited about, so I was just waiting for the news.
When Ash was named, I felt the hire was at the top end of my lowered range of expectations, better than I thought we'd hire. Sort of an "about as good as we were going to get" scenario - years of B1G experience as a coordinator, strong defensive bona fides, worked under a couple of successful people like Meyer and Alvarez, a NC ring to flash about on the recruiting trail... lots of upside potential, especially if he was a detail-oriented workhorse in the mold of Schiano.
Then came a string of bad decisions (the OSU bowl game, the delayed start at RU, the hiring of Mehringer, then of Niemann, of no experienced hand on the offensive side of the ball at all...) then the awful play on the field the first season, with the 2nd year's crop of recruits already having plans of heading out of state... I felt that there was a one year opportunity to strike while the iron was hot and find success at Rutgers, and he had missed it. At the start of the 2017 season, I was already telling friends that I felt we were going to have a new coach by 2020.