Diagnostics generally indicate that patch couldn't parse your patch file.
If the --verbose option is given, the message Hmm... indicates that there is unprocessed text in the patch file and that patch is attempting to intuit whether there is a patch in that text and, if so, what kind of patch it is.
patch's exit status is 0 if all hunks are applied successfully, 1 if some hunks cannot be applied or there were merge conflicts, and 2 if there is more serious trouble. When applying a set of patches in a loop it behooves you to check this exit status so you don't apply a later patch to a partially patched file.
Context diffs cannot reliably represent the creation or deletion of empty files, empty directories, or special files such as symbolic links. Nor can they represent changes to file metadata like ownership, permissions, or whether one file is a hard link to another. If changes like these are also required, separate instructions (e.g. a shell script) to accomplish them should accompany the patch.
patch cannot tell if the line numbers are off in an ed script, and can detect bad line numbers in a normal diff only when it finds a change or deletion. A context diff using fuzz factor 3 may have the same problem. You should probably do a context diff in these cases to see if the changes made sense. Of course, compiling without errors is a pretty good indication that the patch worked, but not always.
patch usually produces the correct results, even when it has to do a lot of guessing. However, the results are guaranteed to be correct only when the patch is applied to exactly the same version of the file that the patch was generated from.