If the CCP economist had any grasp on their economy at al, we probably wouldn't have gotten http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4146298
The news item you linked to isn't a problem of someone misunderstanding economic principles, but of a simple mistake and the resulting bug - there shouldn't have been an additional reward for surviving cargo.
But I don't think the surviving cargo thing was a required factor for the LP loop, it only sped up their initial gains. When they figured out how to manipulate the game's idea of prices upward, they basically were able to exploit infinite arbitrage that resulted from the bits of hardwired game logic that made up part of the market without being subject to/responding to market forces.
I wouldn't blame him for it. Besides, all systems can (and will) be bent, broken, or subverted. Perfect identification of bugs is pretty much impossible. You can get a lot of obvious ones, and assume that the rest are above the ability/will threshold of the playerbase.