These same reports will tell you that he took a step back in 2015, basically he was only closely involved the year following Bollingbroke's departure and it was still in a limited capacity since a large part of the responsiblities are divided between the head of the academy and the manager.
As for Van Gaal and Mourinho, I didn't think that they would be particularly successful and said so at the time on this forum but it's a bit easy to act as if these two appointments were obviously wrong, these type of appointments happen all the time in pretty all clubs and aren't THE reason behind our issues and therefore shouldn't be emphasized the way we do it.
The way I see it, our issues come from what happened before 2013. The backbone of the team was getting old(Carrick, Evra, Vidic, Van Persie, Ferdinand, Giggs, Valencia and Rooney), the football side of things was basically SAF and Martin Ferguson, the rest of the club was declining and in hindsight leading this club after SAF's retirement was an even worse job that I imagined. In my mind it was a terrible job because the squad wasn't built for the future and the club was too SAF-centric.
Now Woodward as an insider should have known that, he may not have been in a position to make deep changes before 2013 but the moment he got the job, he should have had a plan to fix these, I assume, known issues but his now obvious undecisiveness have seen him try his hardest to not rock the boat and keep things the way they used to be. For me that's why we should blame Woodward, not for hiring managers that were popular appointments but for being a bit spineless.