Well Kepler did win that fight. NASA fortunately decided to breathe life into an extended mission called K2 [1]. This didn't happen without A LOT of back and forth between administrators and scientists though.
It's not helped by being hobbled with two of four broken reaction wheels. It's awesome that we've figured out a way to keep prolonging the mission.
You can't argue with the results though; Over a thousand planets discovered with another four thousand candidates. I'm not sure why we don't have multiple Kepler-like missions running simultaneously to map out our entire section of the Milky Way.
