Essentially every single lawyer I watched said similar things.

Maybe from Law-Tube, which isnt necessarily wrong. But I did see my fair share of lawyers who said the defense wasnt terrible, it just wasnt flashy. But it worked for the particular area it was being done in.

And perhaps those accusations about Barnes are "he said, she said", but he has had enough moments of being an arrogant ass that I can believe it (although like you pointed out below, perhaps that just comes with the territory).

I have a hard time believing any of them would ever try to spin it as "yeah some of us were being political hacks and were slowly forced to acknowledge he was innocent."

Have you not been paying attention to the Left over the last few years? They would absolutely do that, because it would give them cred in their own circles. If the juror he was worried about was actually a raging Leftoid, you know damn well she would have done exactly that, and then turned it into a point about how the US is inherently racist. While jurors speaking off the record about what happened during deliberation is also "he said, she said", the fact none of them have tried to make a big deal about it even a year later tells me its at least has weight to it.

I'm not a lawyer, so would you be able to explain what aspect of his jury selection philosophy is controversial?

I am also not a lawyer, but these are the things brought up by one that I saw pointing out how his theory doesnt work. Specifically, there are two major issues with it:

1. Both parties get a say in selecting the jury, and if you are trying to use demo-analysis to stack the deck in your favor, basically the only way you can do it is if the other party are so smooth brained they will let you get away with it uncontested, which is extremely unlikely. And the second the other party picks someone who go against your preference, now you run the risk of a hung jury or losing the case. And if you do get that far, the other party can try and pick at a weakness of your demographic, or even use it against you in appeals ("my client was denied a fair trial!").

2. In short, juries are too random to guess what they would do based on just the demographic data. Every lawyer has that story or has a friend with the story of a case where they thought that they had the perfect jury, a friendly judge, and a rock-solid case, only to lose with the jury because one of them just got a bug up their ass over something completely random that you could have never planned for.