I find FR's press release on 18 January unsatisfying in that
a) Point 3 - a court will likely ignore any kind of "if we don't win this case, we'll be even more awkward in the future" argument. The case is about what's happened in the past, not what one might choose to do in future.
b) Point 4 seems to ignore the principle of law over contract - namely that if a clause of commercial contract goes against a law, then the law takes precedence and the courts get to decide what to do about the contract.
An extreme example of this would be a written contract for person A giving food and shelter to person B, in return for B agreeing to become the permanent slave of A without freedom to leave. Slavery is banned, so is B still obliged to be a slave to A, or does a court have the right to modify / void the contract ?
Leaving the above issue to lawyers to debate....
Given that the average fare + tax + fees comes to more than £40 / 40 EUR, a passenger being refused passage means that Ryanair effectively gets to keep *all* the money the passenger paid, as the admin charge makes reclaiming any tax futile.
Furthermore, some of the passengers who forget their boarding card will have done so on their outbound flight, so Ryanair may get to keep the tax + fees for the return leg as well, since a one-way fare booked at less than 24 hours notice is usually very expensive meaning a passenger who booked a cheapie ticket may just abandon the whole trip. In any case, a passenger who has to pay a reissue fee on an outbound will damn well make sure to get the boarding card for the return leg printed off.
Ignoring the detrimental effect of seriously annoying some customers and making them reluctant to fly with FR again (not that that has worried FR very much in the past), I could see the policy of "if you don't bring the print-out to the airport, then you don't fly at all" policy as being almost as profitable as the £40 / 40 EUR reissue charge...