If you were dumb enough to trust an incompetent exchange (whether you knew or not ahead of time...as there is always risk with 3rd parties) you deserve to lose your coins should that 3rd party fuck up on their responsibilities.
I actually agree with you, but not at the cost of the failure of the coin itself (thus effecting all users of the coin, not just the ones using Mintpal). Vericoin devs chose to save the coin from one user controlling too much as well as hopefully teach a huge lesson to all the users not to keep their coins on an exchange like that.