I'm kind of confused about what the three of you are talking about. Yes, the clue to the puzzle is in the source code; I think that's where they were going with "embedded". "an hour" might be an extreme upper bound, but it's not like getting from the page source to the answer was instantly obvious or trivial. "pathetic" is definitely way over the top.
it's not really meant to be a hard puzzle, per se (that would be pointless and a waste of time). it's just intended not to be really really easy, and useful enough for us to say "this could be a good candidate" based on getting the correct answer.
Well the problem with this puzzle wasn't its level of difficulty, just that it was awkward to complete. It seemed more like a test of my Firebug abilities than anything else.
the fact that you're using firebug, know some basic concepts, can debug javascript and can formulate your own POST requests puts you above quite a few of the applicants we've seen.