Yep it's a complete disgrace. Renaults have superior torque at low RPMs, superior fuel consumption and smaller cooling requirements. Yet when they got the extra HP they weren't forced to tune back those aspects of their engine. FIA once again.
The linked article is actually rather nice but of course lacks, as it is natural, key sources and goes a little bit off track in the middle. Yes RBR got a lot out of Renault despite being down on HP according to pretty much everybody and profited from other qualities of the engine. However Renault was arguably the least reliable of the top engines and certainly not only due to Newys packaging as we have seen in recent yeras. The 09 titles were lost in no small part due to the vastly inferior performance and reliabilty compared to the Merc power of Brawn and in 2010 and 2012 we saw relatively many more Renault failures then Mercedes ones.
Now they arguably a fact of key importance was that from 2010 Renault really did work hard with RBR to get explore the limits of the rules in others, not yet 'frozen' areas were they weren't behind. With hindsight the integrated DDD and the EBD coupled with clever engine mappings were very important elements to give RBR better performance in those slow corners in which it had troubles compared to Brawn GP. Thanks to RBR their engine mappings were put to the best use as no other team developed the rear end around that effect. And obviously this man is once again correct:
“ We win together and we lose together, Its the team, its the engine and its combination that puts us in that position in the first place and without them we wouldn’t have the luxury to even complain” - Sebastian Vettel