I am calling your view of 'code is law' as a distorted view because it isn't that the other side doesn't think that code is law, it's just what do we consider 'the law' to be.
In my world view, if you and I wrote a contract, and in the contract, there is a typo which says that I will pay you $5 gazillion for an iPhone, then that doesn't mean that the courts must enforce it. Clearly, it doesn't follow the 'intent' of the parties.
Now, what if the other side truly signed the contract because they thought that their iPhone was being bought for 5 gazillion dollars, well this is why we don't "JUST" communicate via the contract. We communicate and perform negotiations via other human channels and the legal contract is a formalized expression of our communication.
Same thing goes with smart contracts. I don't intend to use Smart Contracts because the missing 11th commandment said: "Thou shalt obey the Legal/Smart Contracts to the word". I want to use Smart Contracts because they would be an extension of legal contracts taken to the decentralized + technology domain.
Literally, nobody put their money in the DAO because they thought that if a person puts in $1000 in the DAO then he should be able to take out $10 million if he is clever enough. It wasn't a bounty contract. If that was known beforehand, then there is no way it would have accrued $150 million worth of ethers.
> My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics.
Lemme put it this way, had the hard fork not happened, but nearly 90% of the Ethereum holders quit Ethereum after that, (which meant that the hacker's bounty would have been decimated, would you still say that Ethereum is never going to succeed because they didn't honor the hacker's bounty?