Not enough power? Not really. What would more power be used for? If to go faster? That would require a stronger framework, and more fuel, which in turn would make the ship heavier, requiring more lifting gas for the desired payload, and so on.

To be fair, my namesake, the Graf Zeppelin, was relegated to the Germany-Brazil route because with a cruising speed of 60 knots, she was considered too slow for scheduled passenger service in the tempestuous North Atlantic, which Zeppelin considered a 70 knot cruising speed to be the bare minimum (achieved by the Hindenburg, which was designed for that route and to use helium). Ultimately they wanted a cruising speed of 80 knots, engines permitting, to properly balance commercially useful speed with fuel economy.

Later NASA parametric computer analysis has found that, although much higher speeds are preferable for airships over 300-2,000 nautical mile ranges, anything over 5,000 nautical miles does indeed have an optimal cruising speed of 70-85 knots depending on the design, so Zeppelin was right on the money.

both Akron and Macon were misused and mishandled by the Navy brass. Pro tip: don't fly a Zeppelin into a squall, especially with unrepaired damage to a fin.

It wasn’t just damaged, either—an engineering error caused by a last-minute Navy design requirement change reduced the engineering safety factor from 2 to 0.8 (i.e. the fin would fail under normal operating conditions).

Inexcusably, this was known long before the fin gave way causing the ship to crash, but the Navy dragged its feet on installing the reinforcements and conducting repairs for months. Imagine how much hot water that whole fiasco would land them in with today’s regulations.

She was in the middle of the 2nd season when the accident occured.

The first commercial flight of that season, following the ship’s refit, but yes.

Despite the ship’s promising early performance, I’d argue the Hindenburg was indeed a failure in the sense it was not fully converted to hydrogen use after being designed to use helium—as evidenced by the much more thorough conversion her sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin II, underwent in order to prevent the same static-driven freak accident that destroyed the ship. Much more attention was given to making the hull properly conductive to electricity under all moisture conditions, with measures like graphite being added to the ramie netting.

Of course, had the Hindenburg used helium as intended, that disaster would never have happened. It would have shortly been scrapped during World War II like her sister ships anyway, but at least it wouldn’t have gone up in flames.