Paul,
I can assure you that some of the issues that you bring up are problems at all airlines and not just EK. Often proper rest and days off are lost at the whims of management that really don't understand the effects of long haul flying on rest/sleep cycles.
Since EK has been very quiet on the whole MEL incident i can only hope that they are in the process of completing an internal investigation in coordination with the australians and the results of which will be taken into account and our procedures modified to prevent that sort of thing from happening again.
Should the investigation show that it was a crew input error it will not be the first and certainly not the last time that has occured in transport catagory aircraft operations. It may be time the the industry as a whole come up with a better mousetrap with regards to performance data entry.