Hard to say, EA crews are often the last ones to find anything out.
That said, Flybe’s motives and judgement in opening up these routes to the level of competition that a direct head to head with Loganair bought is questionable to say the least. Filling an aircraft with a proportion of cheap seats is great, but look at other places where it works for them and the islanders would have been stuck with 2 or 3 rotations a day to get full aircraft and a successful route.
Of course it’s a nice Teflon get out to say it was a great idea to run a 170, it’s the right aircraft and it didn’t work because our new friend wasn’t up to it.
Whether it was the right aircraft or not we won’t know now as they never tried to get in or out with 70 pax, even on a good weather day. Personally I prefer to trust the pilots who had the opinion that it was definitely not the right aircraft, either financially or operationally.