Takeoff in a plane isn't a hard engineering problem either, but without checklists even one of the best pilots in the world forgot to unlock his rudder before heading down the runway. [1]
Of course no one who cares would intentionally make the choice of building the status page on the infrastructure that it monitors, but it's not that difficult for something to creep into the dependency chain and then you don't find out until the next outage a year later.
Mistakes were made, but attributing it to lack of caring is misguided. Good intentions don't work, you need mechanisms to enforce good practices. Those mechanisms obviously failed here, but the solution is to fix the mechanisms, not ask people to care more.
[1] http://www.ww2hc.org/emailarchives/2011/checklistorigin.htm
