The thing that gets me is that the guys who lead this effort are go-getting ex-finance, ex-trading people who work their butts off and have attention to detail of a microscope. And the article mentions that they did in fact do detailed studies and make financial models of the venture and things looked good enough to push forward. So... clearly even their experience, hard work, and attention to detail was not enough to predict what would happen.

I'm not sure what that means in the end :-). Maybe predicting the future is just hard? Maybe it was a 30-60 bet and they just got unlucky? In that case what they did was not unreasonable and had it worked the same journalists that cackle at them with schadenfreude would be singing their praises.