Rainboe,
I'm amazed at your attitude. The MEL is there not just to help aircraft to continue service without disrupting schedules but also to ensure safe and legal operation of the aircraft.
From memory one of the provisors for inop EPR ind on one engine is that the EPR / N1 is compared with the other operable engine aswell as having to trawl through performance charts for power/N1/altitude figures. The fact that the aircraft had no EPR and was ETOPs also add's to how bad the scenario was.
If Boeing, the FAA and the CAA thought flying with no EPR was acceptible on a twin EPR controlled aircraft/engine then they would have agreed to have this is the MEL. Other aircraft/engine combinations do use only N1 (in fact i believe the original DC10's were EPR controlled then this was removed with several mods) but they are designed to control to N1 settings aka A320/CFM and A320/V2500 (which has EPR but can revert to N1 control which the FADEC software looks after.
And what's this about the flight ops director also being the departing engineer... i would call that a clash of responsibilities... probably find he was the magistrate too. Most strange.