There is a lot of space between 'real engineering' and 'flabbergastingly incompetent'.
> It's pretty straightforward to compute the sum of all coins in your wallets, I would assume.
You assume incorrectly. It's a cold wallet. It's not connected to anything; that is its purpose. To monitor the balance, one would have to write software to watch the blockchain and calculate the balance of specific addresses. This is by no means impossible but in 2011 there were very very few engineers on Earth competent to do it and Mt Gox was trading bitcoins for pennies. Don't underestimate how fast Bitcoin went from a strange curious technology to being worth significant money.
Ultimately you are judging their actions through the lens of hindsight. Best practices weren't even established yet.
> It's pretty straightforward to compute the sum of all coins in your wallets, I would assume.
You assume incorrectly. It's a cold wallet. It's not connected to anything; that is its purpose. To monitor the balance, one would have to write software to watch the blockchain and calculate the balance of specific addresses. This is by no means impossible but in 2011 there were very very few engineers on Earth competent to do it and Mt Gox was trading bitcoins for pennies. Don't underestimate how fast Bitcoin went from a strange curious technology to being worth significant money.
Ultimately you are judging their actions through the lens of hindsight. Best practices weren't even established yet.