I am almost sure that the reasoning for the redirect script was something like this: since they have ads on that "parking" page, whoever tries to access the server, should see the ads. That's probably why they have this terrible redirection script in place. Which still keeps the original question "who would do that", because this is terrible.

The TTL value has no direct connection to the parking page. It's probably by the coincidence that DNS record had a high TTL and pointed to that IP address. But no one can be sure here, because there is always a posibility that DNS was hacked, although the DNS hosting provider sais that DNS error was not a result of a hack.