Two things, really: if you turn down an acquisition that you feel your employees supported, you don’t get to do the “surprised pikachu face” when you turn it down and they go work there anyway. Secondly, it’s presented as if these engineers exfiltrated special knowledge with them... isn’t it fair to also give them the benefit of the doubt in that the same employees may have crucially developed the software themselves before leaving?

In either case I can’t see how this simply doesn’t point at mismanagement by Hooked. From any angle, they created an environment that made these guys think “my time will be better spent at Apple”.