By the way, that Bean was unfamiliar with the Van Allen belt IS incredible, whether he could 'feel' it (the radiation) or not. That I get insulted for pointing that out also goes to motives here. Speaking of which, since you seem to believe that they somehow 'avoided' the belts, possibly you could come up with a contemporaneous account of how they planned the launch to avoid the worst of the radiation. That would go a long way to shutting me up about the matter.
Argument by naive expectation.
You've been told (by conspiracy mongers) to think of the VARB as some Mysterious Deadly Antimatter Space Wedgie. So to you, getting close to this Charybdis of Space should be foremost on everyone's mind.
The reality is that it is a danger as well understood (and probably ranked rather below) that of sunlight, or vacuum. The man is riding on top of megatons of energetic chemistry, dependent every instant on complex and fragile systems just to keep breathing, further away from any possible rescue than Floyd Collins....and bending every bit of his considerable intellect and skills towards the task of "Don't F*** Up, there's a lot of money and prestige riding on this."
He's got other things to think about. And specifically, things he actually has some control over.