The billionaires took advantage as well. They even had been given the direct choice by FD. I can't think of any reason why a game developer would come to this solution. Do you?
Inexperience of what a multiplayer community is all about and the responsibilities that go with it? That's all I can put it down to. And its backed up by the fact that they released the game to the masses a week before the main public holiday, left it woefully understaffed with game support that was probably working from home (the Frontier offices were closed from Dec 24th to Jan 5th according to that support). So yeah, all this leads me to believe Frontier Developments are a little inexperienced when it comes to dealing with this type of online only - online always, game and the type of gaming community that has bought into it.
A lot of players have come from other MMOs where this kind of thing rarely (if at all) happens. I still remember the T2 mining laser incident in the early days of Eve and how the community went in uproar over one guy getting a rare BPO off a dev. CCP learned lessons that day.
In an online community that shares the same gameworld - however loosely we interact with each other - developers should always err on the side of fairness even if they (and many players) think its no big deal. Lessons have to be learned. Every developer scores a few own goals now and then, FD have bagged a hattrick of them in their games' first month of release. Lets hope there are no more to follow.