Of course, there have been some sufferers - Swiss Re for one lost money quarter after quarter on its portfolio CDS, but that was really more a mortgage market misjudgement than something intrinsic to CDS.
Lots of people who should know better (including, most recently, Niall Ferguson in a talk at the Royal Geographical Society this week) have been citing the largely meaningless multi-trillion-dollar gross notionals of CDS as though they symbolised some sort of terrible threat. The results of the various auctions have torpedoed this idea - and the associated worries that the CDS market was peculiarly opaque. Cutting delays in processing and central clearing are good things, but they shouldn't be seen as staving off a crisis.
This Alphaville post welcomes the DTCC's involvement as a needed counter to CDS hysteria. Salmon is growing incensed on the same subject ("...you've got yourself an almost perfectly wrong-headed argument. Did a wave of foreclosures help to bring down highly-leveraged institutions with significant real-estate exposure, among them Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers? Yes. Did "haywire derivatives contracts" in general, and CDS in particular, play a much bigger role? No...")

The last word goes to a commentator who had previously stayed quiet on the credit crisis: HM Queen Elizabeth II.

"...The origins and effects of the crisis were explained to her by Professor Luis Garicano, director of research at the LSE's management department...
Prof Garicano said afterwards: "The Queen asked me: 'If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them? Why did nobody notice it'?"
When Garicano explained that at "every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing", she commented: "Awful."