The unpopular opinions thread.

In truth, Gagarin was one hell of a pilot, and a ballsy Cosmonaut. I have nothing but respect for him. And he did parachute from the fireball of the Vostok spacecraft.

Was he better than an Astronaut? That's very hard to say, considering that Americans and Soviets/Russians have different design philosophies for their spacecraft. The Russians relied a lot more on the scientific and engineering robustness of the flight, and ground controllers controlled the spacecraft largely from the ground on earlier flights. Even today, the Soyuz is heavily automated. The rationale for this was due to the idea that humans could make costly mistakes in zero-g environments, and that even if a cosmonaut was incapacitated or otherwise unable to function properly, the mission could still be scrubbed with the cosmonaut recovered safely.

Whereas the American design philosophy is grounded in the role of the Astronaut actively piloting the spacecraft, due to the heritage of military test pilots being the only astronauts for the first several Groups of Astronauts. American spacecraft are much more technically complex to account for this, as the spacecraft are designed to have as much input from the mission commander and pilot as possible, and the role of flight control in Houston is limited to keeping track of the spacecraft, its crew, and its integrity and keeping the crew up to date on the state of the mission. You might say that in comparison to the Russian/Soviet approach of eliminating as much possibility for human error as possible, we Americans prefer a 'high risk, high reward' style of flight.

On average, most Astronauts and Cosmonauts have the same amount of training and preparation for a flight.

As far as Astronaut Pilots go however, there's no contest. Flying the Shuttle, Apollo, or Gemini, for example was a hell of a lot more intensive than Vostok, Voskhod, or Soyuz. And that's not to say that it's inherent, but it's because of the different design philosophies that went into either countries approach. Americans prefer more manual control over the flight, whereas the Russians want to leave as little to human error as possible. They're both valid, as history has shown. That said, Astronauts had failures of guidance and control automated systems that could have potentially ended in disaster; however, due to the skill and training of the Astronaut pilots themselves, they were able to save their craft and return safely (or even continue the mission; see Apollo 16.)

The most stark observation of this difference was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.

Also, several counters - Look up what Neil Armstrong did on Gemini 8. Or what the crew of Apollo 13 did. Or Gordon Cooper on Mercury-Atlas 9. They were no slouches.