Maybe. Maybe not. What they most certainly misunderstood was the term 'emergency' - or they would have had a specific hard fork contingency as part of the design from the get-go in the case it turned out that the soft fork failed to achieve consensus.
It's like yelling "FIRE! Follow me!"; then jumping out a window with no plan for how you're not going to just splatter on the sidewalk if it turns out you're way higher up than you had hoped.
