Or are you asking why I think they're making it up as they go along? That is my conclusion, to be sure. It's one thing for dominoes to fall, but if you are in a situation where the dominoes are falling and you are not able to predict which dominoes will fall next and respond accordingly, you are making things up as you go along. I'd have expected that almost any decision they could even hypothetically make would run through a system that checked it for violations of constraints, which would have told them way ahead of time that they needed a fresh crew, and they'd have had the entire flight of the replacement plane to get one in (IIRC it flew Miami->Boston just to get us the plane).