A4 is right.
The flight plan you get from the company is their "dream-sheet" which shows you the way they would like you to run the operation for their best interests. You read it, you accept it if you think it will work otherwise you mentally stuff it in the waste bin and decide how YOU are going to plan the operation using the company plan as a guideline.
Despite your best planning and experience even what seemed to be a generous fuel load in dispatch can turn out to be tight. Bet there is not one person on this post who can state that their dispatch never makes a mistake and that their wind forcasts are always perfect.
Even allowing for wind errors etc. it is usually the last 15,000 feet of descent where fuel embarrasments occur. Everything looks great for an on-time and on-fuel arrival and then everything falls apart. There is no way of anticipating many of these events. The original fuel plan looked great, suddenly you see yourself potentially falling into a big hole. This is probably what happened to the original subject of the post so I certainly hesitate to criticise him.
Recently I went to an airfield having an air display which was supposed to end, according to dispatch, at 16.30 local. When we arrived the display was still going at a little past five o'clock. The into wind runway was not in use because of the display which caused a circular tour of the field of 120 degrees to line up with the runway in use. Because the airfield was using only one runway instead of the usual two or three traffic was backed up for miles, we did a twenty five mile straight in (after circling the field remember). Near our normal final approach fix we showed 9,400 pounds of fuel on landing, we actually landed with 7,900 pounds - THIS FUEL WAS ALL USED IN THE AIRFIELD PATTERN, within 25 miles of the field with the runway in sight on a clear visual day.
Do not criticise anyone elses operation until you have all of the facts.