The intent of the whole underlying system is that the intent of all the parties be described by code of the smart contracts. Which are intended to be composable, intended to be used in unanticipated ways, and intended to operate independent of any human oversight. The system is also intended to avoid all ambiguity by enforcing the contracts exactly as described by the code... and to provide certainty of transactions and prevent them from being undone after the fact.

Everybody involved knows all of that, and claims it as a positive feature of the system. At least until they find out that it's actually hard to write bug-free code.

There may indeed not be a legal "meeting of minds" (although there very well also may)... but from an ethical point of view, everybody involved knowingly signed up for exactly that kind of risk. And honestly it would be good public policy if the law held them to it. Otherwise you get people trying to opt out of the regular legal system up until it's inconvenient.

There'd be more of a case if he'd exploited the underlying EVM implementation. But he didn't. He just relied on the "letter" of a contract, in an environment that everybody had sought out because of unambiguous to-the-letter enforcement.

Exactly this. If what is written on the blockchain is not the law in the context of anything involving blockchains and DeFi, then the whole idea of blockchains and decentralized finance is pointless.

You’re assigning a set of beliefs to an entity that doesn’t hold them. The authors of the code are pursuing the matter in court i.e. they see smart contracts as an efficient decentralised solution to a complex problem within the existing legal framework.

Nah, they just want to make money. They fucked up and now they're trying to get the legal system to save them.

> intended to be used in unanticipated ways

Am I an idiot or is it unclear why this is the intention?

I assume OP means it in the sense that the system intends novel uses that the designers didn't necessarily consider. Same with programming languages (or language in general), for example.