It's not about bean counters or whether they got there way. The bean counters don't select these projects. The board would approve something like this. The rationale at the time was that they believed that a select number of routes ex LCY would work, many were mooted including Dubai, Washington, as I understood. So investing in 2 318s was a worthy experiment.
There was a prospect that Odyssey would come in and take some of the highest paying business away. So LCY JFK was an experiment on one hand and a measure to protect their turf. Hindsight is a great thing. Clearly we see now that Odyssey never materialised and who could have forseen covid...