D&D Clever

In our latest D&D session, something odd happened at the very end. Here's the setup: the PCs are sneaking into the second floor of a large building through a giant hole in the wall. The room inside is filled with a kobold and his fire beetles and firebat minions and is obviously quite trapped. We kill everything inside while jets of flame shoot out from the walls.

Now to disabling the trap. Our cleric takes a gander at a complex set of controls and tries to figure out how to turn off the flame jets. There is a small skill challenge (4/2) in which only the cleric participates, which boils down to "roll Thievery a bunch of times, sometimes with Dungeoneering interspersed to provide possible +2s". Nothing besides color occurs. Then I stick a frost spear into one of the nozzles to plug it, which boils down to "roll a standard attack and damage". Then our wizard suggests pouring a bottle of acid on the control panel, which the cleric does, and the nozzles are shut off.

After the DM said the trap was disabled, Chris said, "That was really clever," referring to the acid action.

This got me thinking. Was pouring the acid onto the control panel clever? Maybe, but its result, that the nozzles shut off, is not much evidence that it was clever. Perhaps the DM thought it was clever. Perhaps the DM thought it was time to move on. Perhaps Chris was referring to Eric figuring out that the DM wanted to feel satisfied about his decision to disable the trap and move on, and wasn't referring to the supposed act of thinking acid on a control panel should shut off the nozzles. Perhaps Chris was saying that given that the DM determined the acid shut off the nozzles, we should add "Eric's character was clever in figuring out that the acid would shut off the nozzles" to the SIS. Perhaps Chris was just saying random things.