I'm sorry but it is fairly illustrative of this company's attitude towards flight crew that they would be the last one's notified of something like this. Sure it was a screw up but let's face it, of the people that needed to know about this decision, the captain was the last guy on the list.
As far as support from dispatch, SMNC etc., my experience has been that they are more often a hindrance than a help. The thing that worries me is that we have a lot of DEC's coming from places where they could count on their dispatch for good advice and they probably expect the same level of support here. EK Dispatch is critically undermanned (now where have we heard that before) and just don't have the time to devote proper care to the production of flight plans etc.. They are operating at 120% capacity on a good day. Look out when things get difficult.
The fact that once the airplane was on the ground, they were unable to reassess and adjust their plans to take the passengers off the airplane and turn it around for LGW is a great example of tunnel vision. They had a plan and they were going to stick to it. We specifically train our pilots to reassess, readjust and mitigate. A little of that might have gone a long way.