In that situation, the escrow looses no matter what.
Not necessarily, it depends on the escrow's behavior.
I think they would. If I saw a case similar to the one that you described then it would be my opinion that it is not safe to use them as escrow. The deal you described is one that would not be easily be mediated. If a deal cannot be easily mediated then the escrow should decline to help with the transaction (or in this case get more information about the transaction).
however he may be willing to bite the bullet and take the loss. You get the amount of money you thought you got, and the escrow ends up with less money then he was expecting.
One job of the escrow is to get these kinds of things clarified before telling either party that it is safe to send money to escrow/the other person. In this case they clearly did not do this and it would therefore be unwise to use that person as an escrow in the future, regardless of if they are trading with an alt.
There is an
example of something like this happening, and the person was able to talk their way out of it when it was a direct trade. If this was an escrowed deal with me acting as an
actual neutral third party, then I would be deserving of a negative rating because I did not clarify exactly how much of what was being traded.
I get your point, on the majority of cases there would be little to no difference, but not always. This is a complex problem and it's difficult to come up with the perfect hypothetical example. However I think the point was made: an independent third party would be more neutral so there's no reason to stop using a real third party escrow.
Another point that I would make is that in order to act as an escrow, you need to have a good amount of trust, and generally speaking in order to gain trust, you need to have a lot of trading experience. You also need to have a history of acting honestly.
It would be my opinion that someone with sufficient trading experience to act as escrow would not make the mistake of failing to clarify which currency is to be used in a trade unless they were acting maliciously. If you plan on acting maliciously then you might as well simply run away with the coins.