[mst]

Right, the only thing I'm arguing here is that it's plausible that every step, including the lack of a reply to the emails, could easily have been down to "the organisation was insufficiently organised."

Note that I've had to run around helping projects deal with both that sort of situation and the sort where the company was deliberately screwing over the project out of active malice (take a bow, Nagios Enterprises) and this definitely smells like the former based on what little information I have.

But being on the receiving end of such an event tends to suck baseballs through a carbon nanotube straw either way, and believe me that you have all of my sympathy and my nerding out trying to analyse how said event came to pass was, just, well, just as much a result of having waded through similar swamps previously myself as the sympathy :)