One thing that changed in our company when going from traditional airplanes (MD80) to "high-performance" FMS airplanes (A320), is that SOP no longer required crews to fill out and follow up on the "routing" part of the paper flight plan, because the predictions of the FMS regarding time enroute and fuel available were much better 99% of the time...
After an incident like this, I do reflect on the wisdom of such a policy, if it's going to reduce awareness of fuel consumption and actual fuel state.
In an abnormal configuration, fuel-checks should not be done "now and then" but almost constantly, to get a feel of how the aircraft is performing in actual conditions. Doing this for the first part of the flight would have told those guys how terribly wrong the predictions of the FMS were.