The Guardians used to be a bunch of basically good, generally fair, very powerful and occasionally shortsighted and arrogant bunch... kind of like Hal himself actually.
Over the years they've gotten more and more incompetent and evil, a graph the slope of which has skyrocketed since Johns took over the mythos - unsurprising, he seems to have a very hard time with the basic "hero bows to more powerful superiors who gave him his mission" dynamic that the Guardian-Lantern relationship always used to be.