yes exactly what you said. now imagine not some 2000 btc but 1 million btc and more, so we have the right scale to compare to the vrc theft.
why should I imagine that?
51% hashing power in a PoW system does not give you the power to take coins from anyone.
you cannot mine 1 million btc with stolen hashing power without people noticing well before you get there. do you know of some kind of magic spell to make the entire world fall asleep for some 6 months and not notice their miners aren't paying out ? because I sure don't.
even with 51% of all Vericoins which uses PoS you cannot take coins directly from people.
people gave their coins to mintpal. That is how the hacker was able to steal them.
if people were stupid enough to put 1 million BTC into an exchange where it could be hacked....*ahem* mt gox... then that should be their problem not the problem of the payment network.
the mintpal/vericoin hack only became a problem for the vericoin devs because it would have opened pandoras box.
you just cannot let anyone control 30% of the coin supply of any coin (coin supply is not hashing power) and expect the network to function properly.. especially when those coins are stolen.
mintpal claims they weren't staking but what if they were? and what if another exchange is staking their pos coins using hot wallets.... this could just be the tip of the iceberg.