Actually, to me they seem even more incompetent for this very reason.  He repeatedly said they built for months on the old codebase, and didn't even look to see what was coming out.  And everything worked until the Monero team deployed the new code... Who does that? They and everybody who knew anything about Monero knew there were going to be significant changes at the protocol level so, why in the world wouldn't you make sure you were always coding against the latest version?

That's just extremely poor project management on their part.