Sas, I am sure they were both professionally competent and nice guys who didn't set out to crash that day but doing real IMC IFR does tend to sort the wheat from the chaff.
They clearly didn't brief the MAPt or the MAP and alarm bells should have rung if they were listening to a properly coding ILS but not able to see glideslope indications. Presumably the DME told them directly where the airport was (in terms of distance) and an increasing DME indicates you are going away from the airport.
LORAN has one really useful function - the airport button, that gives you heading and distance to the 20 nearest airports.
Now the suggestion that it is perfectly fine to go IMC in an aircraft you are not familiar with seems to be the point at which most aviators would say no - these guys didn't (military-indoctrinated get the job done attitude?)
Yes, there are, as always, a lot of threads in this accident that could be highlighted in any report but both the aircraft and the airfield were perfectly serviceable - the failures were all human, from getting airborne in the first place in an unfamiliar aircraft to poor IFR procedures and briefing.
You can blame what you like as contributory factors but two experienced guys f*****d up when they shouldn't have - you can't legislate for that.