Pickett gets a bum rap for Gettysburg, largely because, I think, he seemed to be the only trained soldier on the field who was enthusiastic about making the charge.
Officer after officer, and plenty of enlisted as well, thought it was madness to even try. Who was it who said "No body of men of that size in history could have taken that hill". The narratives focuson Longstreet thinking it was going to be a pointless slaughter, but you'd be hard pressed to find a single solitary person who didn't agree.
Only Pickett was happy about it, apparently seeing it as a chance for glory and only afterwards bitterly blaming Lee for having launched the attack. At the time he was all for it.
THAT BEING SAID, however, it was Lee who sent them out there. It wasn't Picketts idea, or Picketts plan. It was Lee's. Pickett was just following orders. So whether he was enthusiastic or not, he had no choice but to go.
Therefore, to me, blaming Pickett for failing in a charge nobody thought was going to succeed in the first place is just not fair.
Five Forks is a different deal. I don't care where he was, what he was doing or if he was in an acoustic shadow (nobody much cuts Grant a break for similar circumstances at Donelson). The hard and fast rule is that if you are the commander and your command gets attacked, it's on you. Period.
It's like the Navy captain who is asleep at 3 am when his XO runs the ship aground. The captain gets the sack. Period. Same deal here: those men were Picketts responsibility. If he was eating fish, well, guess he shouldn't have done that. If he assumed there'd be noattack or that being flanked wasn't possible, well, he was wrong.
Five Forks is on him, although in the end there wasn't a soldier alive who could have held forlong against the numerical advantage Sheridan brought, but it didn't have to be a debacle.
Gettysburg - very hard to see how he's at fault for following RE Lee's orders.