Yes, but that’s subjective. A clue that literally indicated its own answer would be of no interest or challenge to anyone.
It’s all about noticing things in the clue. For example, a few people spotted that DEORR was formed of the letters of ORDER, which just happened to have five letters, like one of the words in the answer. So they looked for phrases involving that word. You yourself saw that the letters were in alphabetical order (although rather than questioning your own nearly correct answer, you immediately proclaimed that the clue was faulty :).) But the incorrect answers show that nothing in the clue guarantees that people can “get the answer from the clue.”
With the harder clues, noticing these things was, naturally, harder, but clearly not impossible, since people did in fact solve them. With the last clue, one person looked at the word lengths and thought that the phrases involving “the day” might fit. Another person spotted the relationship between “the day” and HDY, and another swooped in for the kill.