I feel like the comparison between the COI and Eden is a little distorted in the fandom, which makes sense since we pretty much only get the COI's perspective. But the fact that Eden is shitty doesn't make the COI any good.
Still! The COI obviously was better in some things than literal death cult Eden, but their ideology of keeping humanity alive no matter what, sacrificing countless people to that goal and stripping these people of their very personhood so justifying it is easier...
They aren't the paragon of morality, far from it.
Yeah, they're in an apocaliptic word, everyone has to fight for survival, morals tend to get abandoned during that.
But sending those convicts down into a very dangerous situation to get some data the way they did was A) idiotic or B) plain cruel. If they just wanted to kill them, kill them without wasting resources on subs, if those are likely just gonna get lost in the blood ocean. If they really wanted data you think they would give the convicts a little training first, no? Not just shove them into a death trap without an explenation. Simon's little radiation game wouldn't have happened if he just KNEW what he was doing.
(English is not and never will be my first language, and if I wrote this in a weird or wrong way, that is only because of the faults of this language personally.)