It is kind of sad that yet another thread has degenerated into a weenie waving contest into the percieved dimunition of an airline captains authority.
There is a lesson here. The FO had over 6000 hrs and the Captain over 12,000 hrs, in other words senior guys with lots of experience flying long haul on the airlines biggest equipment. The FO was probably senior enough to hold a narrow body short haul Command if he wanted it. Frankly I think it is rather silly to imply htat this individual was not up to the task of taxing the aircraft, lining up and then doing the takeoff, it is not rocket science. The reason why many airlines do not allow this is because they are too cheap to pay for a tiller on the right side. This was not a case of a 250 hr new hire screwing up.
IN any case it IMO has no bearing on the central question, they had only two taxways to choose from yet chose the wrong one........why.
Yes there was a bunch of related factors (poor markings/signage, a missed opportunity by ATC to alert the crew) but ultimately the crew (that means both Captain and FO !) had completely lost airport situational awareness.
Personally I think the take away is the ease one can fall into complacency on the "easy" tasks. I look back at the screwups in my career and and many are similar to this incident...falling into the trap that "this is straight forward so I got it and I can start thinking about the next step".
BTW my company SOP is that the "ready" call includes the taxiway where the aircraft is holding short, something that we did not use to do untill the new Director of Flight ops insisted this procedure be adopted.