Saturn V suffered several engine failures. It had persistent pogo oscillations that put Apollo 6 into the wrong orbit and forced much of its test plan to be canceled, and nearly destroyed Apollo 13 during launch. Vibrations severely damaged Skylab during its launch. I would not say it never failed. It never went kaboom in the sky, but there are other ways to fail.
It was an exaggeration, but the comment's underlying point is spot on: the "engineering" that we do doesn't hold up in terms of rigor or cleverness that AE and other related engineering disciplines exhibit.
Counterpoint: if we tried to build all software using the same rigorous and "clever" processes that aerospace engineers do, almost nothing would ever get built. It's a different process because it's a different field, not because aerospace engineers are fundamentally more clever.
Have an aerospace engineer cow-orker; one favorite quote for why he works in enterprise software is, "Because this flies and that (pointing at an Ares-1 mockup) doesn't."
On the other hand, there's nothing "engineering" about software engineering.
And I would tend to agree with your second point. We might occasionally borrow some formalism and organizational structure from our engineering cousins, but it's different in enough ways that it probably shouldn't bear the same moniker.
